I have been pretty busy lately. I am not sure what I have been really doing though that makes me so busy. Mostly socializing, which could technically be classified as studying and working, since a lot of the socializing takes place in Chinese. In fact, I would even go as far as to say that the central part of my job is to create guanxi（关系）or make connections. This is not quite as devious as it sounds. Really, I spend my time making friends. Chatting. Sharing stories. Listening to the crazy things that people have done with their lives thus far, and taken part in communal musings about what we are all going to do in the future. Ofcourse, these conversations are usually accompanied by various and delicious food or drink. Lately, I have been indulging in fresh fruit juice:pineapple,watermelon, strawberry, orange, mango. As you can see my life is tough. Filled with adversity.
Besides (sometimes) going to class, my biggest project right now is finding homestay families that Dragons' students will live with for a week or two this summer. It was kind of a slow process starting out for a number of reasons. The person who did this job last year has been helping me out a bit, but she is really busy with her new job and so I have kind of been left to go at it alone. Although, not completely alone because I have a Chinese friend who is also going to be working with Dragons this summer helping me out. She is mostly helping with translating applications and finding new families.
In the week or so leading up to me going to visit a family by myself for the first time, a talked with a bunch of people, who when I told them what I was actually going to be doing, they were like, "oh! that sounds like it would be really hard for you." Not exactly words of encouragement. It is also intimidating that the person who did this job last year is not only Chinese (helpful for both language and culture), but she is also extremely chatty and bubbly, and she always knows exactly what to say to make people feel comfortable. I It is also one of those projects that the more you sit around thinking about it (and not actually getting started) the more scary and impossible it seems.
Fortunately, in this past week it has all started to come together. I have visited a few families on my own, and I feel pretty good about my ability to communicate and make a good impression. The first family I visited was really warm and welcoming. They helped me finish sentences when I could not think of the right word, and referred to me as "Teacher Lexi"(in Chinese). At the second family I visited, the mother kept complimenting my Chinese, saying how well I spoke. In response to which, the father said "she's okay. there still seem to be a bunch of words that she doesn't really know how to use." Fair point. I still have a long way to go. But the fact that I can pretty much always get my point across one way or another (sometimes after a series of mumbles, restarts, and hand gestures), means that my main objective (communication) is being accomplished.
Chinese kids are also really funny and honest. The little girl in the family I met last night was slightly appalled by the density of my arm hair. She told her mom, "Mama, you can see foreigner's arm hair, but you can't see ours." She also noticed that our noses were different and our hair different colors. Her mother asked me if it was true that in foreign countries families could have more than one kid. When I said yes, she said something like, "well, that's nice, isn't it."
So I have gotten a nice start on this daunting task. Hopefully as I get more and more comfortable with this process I will stop saying so many silly sounding and grammatically incorrect things and work on my comedic timing when telling cultural misunderstanding anecdotes. For example, there is a great one about a Chinese mom heating up a cup of milk for her foreign student (Chinese people like to drink warm milk) and then the student being puzzled, and putting the milk into the fridge to cool it off (as American custom dictates) and then the mother being confused and reheating the milk, and the American in turn putting it in the fridge again.
I will probably be visiting 3-4 families a week for the next 2 months. While it is much harder for me to do this job than it would be for a Chinese person, I also think that there are some positives for both sides. For the Chinese family, they get to have a foreigner come visit their home and get a little taste of what it will be like if they end up hosting a student this summer. They get to stare at me and ask me questions and have me explain why I do not have pale skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes. For me, I get to practice speaking Chinese with people who really want to understand, who compliment my language skills, even when I may not deserve it, and I get to hang out with really interesting Chinese families in their homes. I might have a different perspective on this whole process after I have visited 20-30 families (instead of my current 3). Either way, it is crazy that this is my job. It is also crazy that I have been in this country for 8 months, that I only have about 3-ish months left, and that before I know it I will be back in the good 'ol US of A...
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Monday, April 13, 2009
Things that have happened recently
I have had lots of visitors lately. Also, many people have left Kunming. I am living in this crazy city where many people are just sort of passing through, here for a month or two or six and then off on the next adventure. Of course, there are also many people who have been here for years. There is a whole contingent of somewhat strange older white men who came to Kunming 30 years ago and just never left. They sit around smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee all day until evening time when they exchange their coffee cup for a cold beer.
However, these guys are not the majority. The majority of people in Kunming are passing through...for a week or a semester or a couple of years. It is an interesting mindset among foreigners. You find a group of people you like and then they disappear for a month to go traveling through Vietnam or Laos or to go back to their native land. And then you meet more cool new interesting well-traveled people and make friends with them for a while. And yet, somehow it seems that all the foreigners in Kunming know each other.
Exactly two days after my brother left China my friend from Macalester who is currently working in Beijing came to visit for a couple days. During this time we visited a bunch of the Buddhist Temples around Kunming that I had yet to get to. I also educated him on the wonders of the Kunming dining experience, we attended a photography club meeting at the botanical gardens with a bunch of Chinese college student who met on a website (something that is much more common and less sketchy here than in the states), and spent some time discussing our experiences thus far in China.
For example, my friend put out an add for a language exchange partner in Beijing where he lives. He got a response from a Chinese woman who expected him to be a big strong handsome rich successful white guy and potential husband. When they met to practice speaking together she seemed rather disappointed that he was so young (she was 27) and that he was therefore not a potential future spouse. She patted him on the head and bought him the Chinese equivalent of a lollipop or a cookie.
After eating his way through Kunming, my friend returned to Beijing. The next day passover started, and I have to admit that I skipped out on a huge seder of 50 or so people that was being organized by the Israeli population of Kunming in order to go to the Hot Springs with my fellow Dragons colleagues. All of the semester program instructors have been working really hard and were leaving the next day to go traveling for a month and somehow I got to tag along on this crazy China Spa experience.
For 170 kuai ($25...which is A LOT of money in China) we got to wear huge comfy terri-cloth bathrobes, lie around in pools of hot water that had been infused with various Chinese medicinal or beneficial herbs, relax in a sauna, play around in a huge swimming pool filled with various water-using massage devices and ball-pit balls (for throwing at each other), get a 1.5 hour Chinese Massage, eat noodles, and have our toenails clipped for us while eating a jello-like substance that tasted a bit like charcoal. My favorite part though was the matching shorts and t-shirt pajama set that we all got to wear (I very nearly stole mine because they were that awesome) and the identification bracelets that made us all feel a little bit like we were in some sort of mental hospital. So, you see, I have an excuse for missing the passover seder.
This past Thursday the Dragons semester group took off for their month of travel, on Saturday my friends who are studying with the S.I.T. program in Kunming hit the road for the next six weeks, and while I will miss these people for a bit, lets just say that I have not been sitting at home moping about it.
I spent my weekend reading and relaxing, going out for meals and chatting with friends. I ate my first da-pan-ji (literally big plate chicken), a food that comes from Xinjiang which is in the northwest part of China that has a heavy Muslim influence and incredibly delicious food. This dish is literally an entire chicken (it serves four) cooked up with potatoes and some green peppers in a rich tangy sauce. When I say an entire chicken, I mean the ENTIRE chicken. Evan would not have liked this very much because when he was here I 'accidentally' ordered him chicken feet instead of chicken wings and he nearly cried and asked if we could remove them from our table. I said no, and started to attack him with them. He liked this a lot.
I also have a Chinese friend who offered to teach me how to cook. She is a great cook, and an incredibly nice and generous person. The problem is that she is too nice and doesn't actually let me help so much, I chop a few vegetables here and there and carry the dishes from the kitchen to the table. However, the lessons so far have done little to actually make me feel more comfortable with cooking in China. I have, however, gotten to eat some amazingly delicious homemade food and so I am okay with it.
Today I spent nearly the entire day speaking Chinese. This really shouldn't be a big deal because last semester I spent every day all day speaking, but since I have come to Kunming I have been speaking too much English. I went to class in the morning (the old Japanese men entertained me by teasing each other about drinking too much alcohol)had lunch with a Chinese friend, then went to chat with a potential Chinese teacher for dragons summer programs, and then this evening went to visit a family that will host dragons students this summer in order to learn how to interview and screen families. I have that I-have-spoken-a-lot-of-Chinese-today feeling in my mouth where forming the sounds of the English language becomes a bit difficult. I should probably make it my goal to get this feeling more often.
Also today, a random friend who I worked with two summers ago showed up in Kunming. He contacted me because he is studying in Beijing and came down to my province for a visit. We had a nice meal where I got to introduce yet another person to the amazingness that is Yunnan food. It is pretty weird and at the same time not weird at all to have random people continuously appear in this city.
Note to the reader: I just went through and proofread and found about 10-15 problems with my grammar and ability to speak in the past tense. -has-have-had was a particularly large problem. I am sorry for any more problems that exist that might make reading this blog a little painful, or make you think that the author is not a native English speaker.
However, these guys are not the majority. The majority of people in Kunming are passing through...for a week or a semester or a couple of years. It is an interesting mindset among foreigners. You find a group of people you like and then they disappear for a month to go traveling through Vietnam or Laos or to go back to their native land. And then you meet more cool new interesting well-traveled people and make friends with them for a while. And yet, somehow it seems that all the foreigners in Kunming know each other.
Exactly two days after my brother left China my friend from Macalester who is currently working in Beijing came to visit for a couple days. During this time we visited a bunch of the Buddhist Temples around Kunming that I had yet to get to. I also educated him on the wonders of the Kunming dining experience, we attended a photography club meeting at the botanical gardens with a bunch of Chinese college student who met on a website (something that is much more common and less sketchy here than in the states), and spent some time discussing our experiences thus far in China.
For example, my friend put out an add for a language exchange partner in Beijing where he lives. He got a response from a Chinese woman who expected him to be a big strong handsome rich successful white guy and potential husband. When they met to practice speaking together she seemed rather disappointed that he was so young (she was 27) and that he was therefore not a potential future spouse. She patted him on the head and bought him the Chinese equivalent of a lollipop or a cookie.
After eating his way through Kunming, my friend returned to Beijing. The next day passover started, and I have to admit that I skipped out on a huge seder of 50 or so people that was being organized by the Israeli population of Kunming in order to go to the Hot Springs with my fellow Dragons colleagues. All of the semester program instructors have been working really hard and were leaving the next day to go traveling for a month and somehow I got to tag along on this crazy China Spa experience.
For 170 kuai ($25...which is A LOT of money in China) we got to wear huge comfy terri-cloth bathrobes, lie around in pools of hot water that had been infused with various Chinese medicinal or beneficial herbs, relax in a sauna, play around in a huge swimming pool filled with various water-using massage devices and ball-pit balls (for throwing at each other), get a 1.5 hour Chinese Massage, eat noodles, and have our toenails clipped for us while eating a jello-like substance that tasted a bit like charcoal. My favorite part though was the matching shorts and t-shirt pajama set that we all got to wear (I very nearly stole mine because they were that awesome) and the identification bracelets that made us all feel a little bit like we were in some sort of mental hospital. So, you see, I have an excuse for missing the passover seder.
This past Thursday the Dragons semester group took off for their month of travel, on Saturday my friends who are studying with the S.I.T. program in Kunming hit the road for the next six weeks, and while I will miss these people for a bit, lets just say that I have not been sitting at home moping about it.
I spent my weekend reading and relaxing, going out for meals and chatting with friends. I ate my first da-pan-ji (literally big plate chicken), a food that comes from Xinjiang which is in the northwest part of China that has a heavy Muslim influence and incredibly delicious food. This dish is literally an entire chicken (it serves four) cooked up with potatoes and some green peppers in a rich tangy sauce. When I say an entire chicken, I mean the ENTIRE chicken. Evan would not have liked this very much because when he was here I 'accidentally' ordered him chicken feet instead of chicken wings and he nearly cried and asked if we could remove them from our table. I said no, and started to attack him with them. He liked this a lot.
I also have a Chinese friend who offered to teach me how to cook. She is a great cook, and an incredibly nice and generous person. The problem is that she is too nice and doesn't actually let me help so much, I chop a few vegetables here and there and carry the dishes from the kitchen to the table. However, the lessons so far have done little to actually make me feel more comfortable with cooking in China. I have, however, gotten to eat some amazingly delicious homemade food and so I am okay with it.
Today I spent nearly the entire day speaking Chinese. This really shouldn't be a big deal because last semester I spent every day all day speaking, but since I have come to Kunming I have been speaking too much English. I went to class in the morning (the old Japanese men entertained me by teasing each other about drinking too much alcohol)had lunch with a Chinese friend, then went to chat with a potential Chinese teacher for dragons summer programs, and then this evening went to visit a family that will host dragons students this summer in order to learn how to interview and screen families. I have that I-have-spoken-a-lot-of-Chinese-today feeling in my mouth where forming the sounds of the English language becomes a bit difficult. I should probably make it my goal to get this feeling more often.
Also today, a random friend who I worked with two summers ago showed up in Kunming. He contacted me because he is studying in Beijing and came down to my province for a visit. We had a nice meal where I got to introduce yet another person to the amazingness that is Yunnan food. It is pretty weird and at the same time not weird at all to have random people continuously appear in this city.
Note to the reader: I just went through and proofread and found about 10-15 problems with my grammar and ability to speak in the past tense. -has-have-had was a particularly large problem. I am sorry for any more problems that exist that might make reading this blog a little painful, or make you think that the author is not a native English speaker.
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Bringing My Blog Back
Hello Everyone! I have decided that is it time for my blog to be mine again. While we have all enjoyed Evan's unique writing style and endless musings on China and the NCAA, he has now fled the country and I think it is time for him to get his own blog.
As always, it has been a long time since I lost wrote, and I am not quite sure where to start. It was really fun having Evan here. Not only did we have a great time, but it was really fun for me to show my brother (who had never ventured outside of North America) another part of the world. Obviously,my first goal of having him here was for him to enjoy himself, but I also thought it was really important to put him in situations where he was a little bit uncomfortable, surrounded by foreign people speaking languages that he could not understand, on dirty, smelly, buses and having to listen to me have conversations with cab drivers and Chinese friends during which he constantly asked, "are you laughing at me?" Sometimes we were. Usually we were talking about something that had absolutely nothing to do with him.
For the first entire week that Evan was here we stayed in Kunming in my beautiful apartment with all of the comforts of home. (meaning I don't think he had to use a squat toilet once.) We went on some day trips, a put my brother on a bike in China (something that requires considerable guts and even greater reflexes), and I fed him a lot of spicy, foreign, and in general "strange" food (although he rejected my offer to buy him a pig foot.) We also played some basketball and frisbee, Evan enjoyed spreading the wonders of BeerDie, and I got to introduce my brother to the good people of Kunming that I have come to know and love. It was really cool for me to have Evan dropped into my world for a little while.
But he was a little bit too happy and comfortable in Kunming. It was not quite weird enough or hard enough for him (except for a bit of gastro-intestinal distress that he chose not to write about in his blogs for fear that his readers did not want to know.) So we went to the long distance bus station and got on a bus. For those of you who have not been to a bus station in China, it can be a bit overwhelming. As soon as you pull up in front of the station people start yelling at you, thrusting papers at you, trying to get you to buy what they are selling or go where they want to take you. For me, I expect this, I know how to walk straight ahead and get them to leave me alone. Evan was a bit more frazzled. However, we got tickets and got on an average China bus with tiny China sized seats, surrounded by average Chinese people. Evan was in China at last.
Vendors got on and off the bus, peddling newspapers and maps, eggs and corn, announcing their products in country-side accented Mandarin. Evan, feeling overwhelmed for maybe the first time since he found me at the airport, asked me if all Chinese bus stations were this crazy. I told him that this was just a small city of 6-7 million and therefore this is a small, relatively-mellow station. Welcome to China. At this point, I told Evan that seeing him uncomfortable makes me happy. Yes, this may sound cruel, but it is true. Because it is not pointless discomfort, it is a feeling that is productive and that he overcame and learned a whole lot from. (Even if he doesn't know it.)
Dali was awesome. When I told the taxi driver on the way to the old town that my brother was a sports broadcasters, he asked if Evan had ever seen Yao Ming, and was disappointed when Evan's answer was "only on T.V." We went on a crazy biking adventure in which Evan's bike rebelled against him from the very beginning and we made our way through small villages and open fields where local farmers (mostly) smiled at us as we passed. We also hiked a 4,100m peak (really high) and stayed in a small guesthouse on a mountain.
We eventually made our way back to Kunming. We spent Evan's last Saturday in China mountain biking with a few of my hardcore biker friends up and down the foothills of Kunming. The entire ride took about 4-5 hours (including the time spent fixing bike chains with the sophisticated tools of rocks, pliers, and the washers that happened to be in my backpack because I was planning to make earrings out of them). Evan only fell down/crashed into strangers/nearly killed himself and others a handful of times. It was a great ride that challenged us both.
The last night that Evan spent in China was phenomenal. We had dinner with a few friends and then eventually made our way to Karaoke, where we sang our hearts and souls out for nearly four hours. I KNEW my brother would love KTV. It is possible that he liked the sing-along slightly more because of the Baijiu that he was peer pressured into drinking. It was a great group of people and the perfect way to spend Evan's last evening/early morning in China.
On Tuesday morning, I brought Evan to the Kunming Airport and he put himself on a plane to take him back to the land of forks and ice water. He was worried about culture shock and readjusting after being in China for only 2 weeks. I don't even want to think about what it is going to be like for me after an entire year.
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