Chinese New Year

This past February was my first, and likely only, chance to spend the Spring Festival in China (I went home during my first winter vacation in China). The Spring Festival is the 15-day holiday that begins with the Chinese New Year, and is by far the most important holiday of the year, when practically all 1.3 billion Chinese people return home to spend time with their family. My friend Joy invited me to visit the home of her family and the families of some mutual friends in the area of Jiuquan (酒泉), a city roughly three hours from Zhangye.

Chinese holidays seem to mostly revolve around seeing family and eating, and I arrived on the evening of the Chinese New Year just in time for the large and excellent meal prepared by Joy's family. CCTV broadcasts a lengthy holiday show for the occasion, full of pop singers, acrobats, and skits that is the most-watched television event of the year, but I seemed to be the only one interested in it of the group.

Firecrackers are also a tradition of the holiday, to the joy of Chinese children and the dread of myself (for someone who doesn't like sudden, loud noises, China was a strange choice). The stroke of midnight on the New Year in China is the closest I ever hope to get to the sound of war.

The following day Joy and I took a bus well outside of town to the village where our friend Beth lives. Beth graduated from Hexi University and is now a teacher in her town. The people in Beth's family were as warm and welcoming as any I have met in China, and I really enjoyed my stay. Unfortunately, I could not say the same for the warmth of the unheated household--it was the coldest Chinese winter in 50 years, and we spent much of our time huddled around the cooking stove. I found her father to be a hard and silent man, but I gradually came to feel that he did like me. He was a farmer who only rested for five days during the year (for the Spring Festival) after all, a lifestyle that would leave me on the quiet side as well.

We passed the holiday much in the same way I usually pass time with Chinese people--chatting, eating a lot, pretending to understand the conversation, eating, and taking photographs. It was not action-packed but there was a simple charm to it that I appreciated. The Chinese I know in Gansu province always seem to act much younger than their age, and I don't when I've seen college students take that much pleasure in playing in the snow.

One of the moments that stands out in my mind was watching Joy play with a cat, an animal her own family had clearly never owned before. Not knowing how to pick it up, she firmly grabbed its front left leg and lifted it straight off the ground. The cat didn't seem too traumatized, however, as it did start to purr once she got it into her lap and started to pet it. But confused by the noise the cat was making, Joy exclaimed "he is very angry!" I told her it was purring because it was happy. "How would you know?" she laughed. "Are you a cat?"

When I left Beth's family after a few days, they seemed sad to see me go. Her two younger male cousins, who rarely spoke but spent much of their time around me, actually cried a little as I prepared to leave, which was touching and unexpected. Overall it was a relaxing and memorable experience, and I'm glad I didn't pass it up.

Halloween in Zhangye

This term I've had the pleasure of the company of two friends from America, Stefanie and Nissa. They taught in the city of Yangzhou last year and this year decided to come to this university to work on my recommendation. This has led to a lot more American-style fun lately, including a colorful Halloween last Wednesday.

As I mentioned a year ago, celebrating Halloween in China can be pretty memorable. Christmas has become popular in China (some stores and bars even have Christmas decorations year-round) but Halloween is still barely known in these parts. Not being within a thousand miles of a good Halloween costume store, we first had to make our own costumes, which involved a long, long weeknight on October 30th making a cardboard box into a witch's hat. We had earlier also done some pumpkin carving with Chinese characteristics; small, green Jack-o-lanterns fashioned out of souvenir Xinjiang knives.

At night we held a Halloween party for students, with decorations, the Monster Mash, apple bobbing, toilet paper mummies, a raffle and a cake walk. With 35 freshman practically bouncing off the walls with excitement in my apartment ("do you want to play a game?" "YEEESS!!!!") I was feeling a little claustrophobic, but the students had a great time and it all went pretty smoothly. Afterwards we went to see our friends at our favorite bar, China Fire, and shower them with candy.

However, my favorite part of the day may have been in the afternoon after we first dressed up. We each went to class in costume, which was cause for plenty of excitement and camera phone pictures with students. We also had some shopping to do, leading to the priceless reactions of locals to the sight of a witch (Nissa), vampire (Stefanie), and devil (me) getting money from the ATM....

...eating pasta at the nicest restaurant in town...

...shopping for produce.....

...getting assistance at the supermarket...

...deciding between eel and chicken in a bag...

...picking up some sausage....

...choosing candy for the party...

...buying imported liquor...

...checking out...

...and checking a cane and witch's broom at the bag check.

Lantern Festival, A Friend Visits

My first weeks back in Zhangye have been pretty relaxing, as my students have had their assigned cleaning duty, when they clean the campus for a week instead of going to class. I passed two of my students wearing red arm bands, who instead of cleaning had volunteered for the job of patrolling campus with clipboards in search of students playing hooky. A couple of weekends ago, me and Andrew had a visit from a friend named Daisy, who was an English student last year and now works as a teacher outside of Lanzhou. We shared a Big Plate of Chicken and "played" together along with her friend Rose. There are many awkward English phrases common here that come from translating too literally from Chinese.

While I was with them, Daisy and Rose made plans to make dumplings with Yang Lili, a teacher in the English department also known as Isabella. Daisy assured me I was also welcome, but my arrival at Isabella's apartment made her incredibly nervous and self-conscious. She said she had never invited a foreigner to her home before, even her co-teacher, because her cooking wasn't good enough. She also said she was embarrassed because the food wasn't ready, and when she has guests she only allows them to come when the food is finished. She was hardly able to talk about anything besides my being there, even joking several times she should break off her friendship with Daisy. When the first round of dumplings was finished, she insisted me and her husband should start first, but her husband immediately got up to take care of some office business without taking a bite. Despite her constant self-deprecation the food was, as with every single time a Chinese person has cooked for me, delicious. The focus on your foreignness is one of the frustrations of living in China, especially coming from a diverse country like America. It's refreshing when I do meet people who interact with me as if I were just another of their friends, Daisy being an example.

For instance, my friend Little Ma opened a new guitar shop in front of the school yesterday, and invited me to come at 10 a.m. for the grand opening. As expected, he wasn't there, and one of his friends said in very loud, slow Chinese "go have a seat inside". I spent a pointless hour sending text messages on my phone, during which time Little Ma never showed and none of them said a word to me, despite knowing me for most of a year. Little Ma is also fond of calling me "the foreigner" when talking about me with other people.

Plenty of people want to make friends with us, but far fewer are interested in forming any kind of substantial friendship and really getting to know us. We also get random invitations from strangers. For instance, the other day Miss Mao arranged a mysterious lunch with a friend who wanted to meet the foreign teachers at Hexi. We were sure we were going to be talked into something, perhaps English lessons for a middle school son or daughter. The lunch was extravagant, round-table style with a rotating middle for the dishes, and the men were all wearing suits, but it turned out they just wanted to have lunch, play drinking games with us and take some pictures. Which was fine, but it struck me how little interest they had in actually talking to us, since we all spoke some level of Chinese. The meal ended with a kind of Chinese (or likely Mongolian) game where a girl in a colorful minority outfit presents you with a scarf and sings, insisting you drink until she stops.

Though I unfortunately missed the Chinese New Year, which apparently is a fun time to be around Chinese people, the Spring Festival holiday associated with it lasts two weeks, and I caught the last few days in Zhangye. The last day is known as the Lantern Festival in English, and big portions of the city were decked out with dozens upon dozens of red lanterns and decorations. The square was Ground Zero, and had become something out of a Dr. Seuss illustration. Zhangye swelled with people, many coming in from the surrounding countryside to see the lanterns. For a day Zhangye was the nightmare I feared China could be like, with so many people it was a struggle just to get around. Chinese people love firecrackers, and all evening we were surrounded by a cacophony of noise. It sounded like a war zone, and with so many children setting off fireworks, I was sure somebody was going to lose an eye. The restaurants were so busy that when we sat down for dinner late in the evening, they had run out of water (which must be boiled). When Daisy went back to Lanzhou the next night, there were so many people at the station they wouldn't let non-ticket holders in to see off their friends (though me and Andrew, playing the ignorant foreigners, got in). Daisy presumably had to find a place to stand for the 8 hour overnight trip, and I heard of another girl who didn't use the bathroom on a long-distance train ride because there were too many people. According to the interesting Chinese Lessons, China is the only country in the world to recognize to effects of traveling in overcrowded trains as a psychiatric condition, and those who commit crimes while suffering from "travel psychosis" are spared the death penalty. So the Lantern Festival was exciting, but also an assault on the senses. Actually, I guess you could say that about China as a whole.

Zhangye, Year Two

At the train station, Andrew and our friend Joy were waiting for me, a pleasant surprise. We joined the other original “daughters” Sarah and Fiona for dinner, a welcome re-introduction to Zhangye and its food. After feeling poor in America, I was happy to the pay the 30 yuan ($3.75) bill for the five of us. We had never been there and the restaurant staff were beside themselves over Andrew’s conversation skills, and after being away for a month it was funny to be back in the midst of all the curiosity. The next day we started up our traditional Friday foreign teacher dinner and caught up with each other. We went to China Fire afterwards, but our friend He Le was not there; sadly, it seems there was some kind of big fight outside of his bar during the Spring Festival, and he had to go to the hospital. Apparently he is out and doing fine, but he hasn’t returned to work yet, and we don’t know the details of what happened.

Gary, Andrew and Stephen went home quite early but me and Danielle stayed longer. This meant that there was a decent row of empty beer bottles at a table with only two people, and several newly arrived customers asked in awe if all the empties belonged to us, so I told them that Americans are very lihai, meaning fierce or excellent at something. Danielle is beloved by Chinese people, especially Chinese men, and when I was in the bathroom a group of friends in their 20’s invited her to their booth. So we stayed longer and drank more than planned, playing Chinese drinking games and teaching them an American one that always goes over well. I bought a mobile phone immediately before leaving Zhangye in January, and several of them asked for my number, and at the end of the night they insisted I share a taxi with them. It’s good to be back.

Skiing with Chinese Characteristics

Since Christmas fell on a Monday, we decided to celebrate over the weekend. Danielle and Stephen being as ambitious as they are, we ended up traveling 9 hours to the city of Hami in the province of Xinjiang, mostly to see our British friend Tracy and to go skiing. This was well worth the trip. Hami is perhaps slightly bigger than Zhangye, with a similarly small foreign population (meaning you can count them on your fingers), and an eccentric group at that. Two are married to Chinese – an American girl who addresses her own husband as “Mr. Tian” and seems to speak at least some Chinese, and a 60+ year-old man who is married to a 35-year old Chinese woman, and who speaks approximately 8 words of Chinese from the look of it. However, since she was taught English by her smart-ass husband, she had one of the best Chinese-English senses of humor I’ve seen. She seemed a feisty woman, and in fact not only yelled at Tracy to “go back to England and find your own husband!” recently in a fit of jealousy, but started a short fist-fight with her.

Skiing outside of Hami was definitely Skiing With Chinese Characteristics. Me and Stephen at least were well amused to arrive and see this ski “resort” we had traveled so far to reach—a total of one slope, which was no more than a quarter of the size of the smallest bunny hill I’ve seen in America. Which was probably just as well—I may have been the only person in the place who had skied more than twice, and the well-to-do Chinese women who arrived seemed interested mostly in giggling, falling a lot, and getting personal assistance from the “fit” employees (to use a British-ism/Tracy-ism). I would call them ski instructors, had I seen any instructing whatsoever going on. There was also tubing on offer, which was generally agreed to be more fun than the skiing.

That night we went out on the town, and Tracy made plans to meet a Chinese women she knows and her group of friends. This was at a rather up-scale dance club, in which there was no dance floor and everyone danced in their little personal space around their table. Danielle fixed her eyes on a Chinese guy in the group, and Stephen simply likes to dance, so I began to feel a little bored. Tracy then practically pushed me into dancing with a small group of attractive girls, which was suddenly going quite well—until approximately 3 minutes later, when it was time to leave. The obviously interested one asked in (Chinese-)English, “your phone number is how much?” as I left, but I’ll add another check to the “missed opportunities with Chinese girls” column. Zhangye is unfortunately so small, conservative, and aware of the smallest move we make that I think girls here are off-limits (and married by 20 anyway). And everyone knows where we live - one off-balance girl having my phone number is probably enough (more on that another day). The second bar we went to was dull for me and Stephen, who mostly contained our irritation at the stunning beauties in the group being spoken for and watched the recreational activities going on around us in confusion.

The main activity of our last day in Hami was for the four of us to get massages. Not just a massage, but a three-hour marathon on the 15^th floor of an expensive hotel, which would be Tracy’s style. So, I sat in a robe and long underwear for hours as a cute but rather young-looking girl soaked my feet. Now I know how to say “ticklish” in Chinese. I’ve never done that before but supposedly it’s very expensive in America; here it ran us about $9 each.

We returned to Zhangye at about 5:30am on Monday morning, Christmas morning. We were offered the day off but it was much too complicated to rearrange our final exams; hopefully I won’t make a habit of working on Christmas day. It didn’t particularly feel like Christmas, though a number of students stopped by my home with gifts, including a scarf from me and Andrew’s friends “the daughters”, which they knitted themselves. And what is Christmas without eating Beef Noodles with Andrew and two of the daughters. In the evening me, Gary, Danielle, and Andrew celebrated at China Fire (where else lately), where I fought off a sudden case of home-sickness, followed by fighting off the urge to inflict physical harm on a few excruciatingly annoying new Chinese “friends” who had had a bit too much Christmas cheer.

More fun than Christmas itself was the English Department’s Christmas Party the week before. The Party, which included 50 guests and the renting out of an entire restaurant/bar/music hall in town, was moved up to Thursday solely so that me and Danielle would be able to attend. It turned out that it was also the first day the place was open, so they had likely moved up their first day of business simply because me and Danielle were going to be gone during the weekend. Certainly you’re never starved for attention here. Though I must admit we did help the party along—I’m always willing to sabotage the poor music, and Danielle got the dancing started as per usual. A few of our students came to sing songs for us, which was sweet, including a very endearing student of Danielle’s whose name is Bamboo. That’s a new contender for my favorite English student name, along with recent favorites Accident, Black, and Jedi, or rather Jedi Dawson Shi. The food was tasty, the dancing was genuinely enjoyable (dancing with my students, who are almost my age…. appropriate?), and we only had to sing one song (My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean, chosen by our fair Scotsman).

Halloween

On this past October 31st, I think we gave Zhangye the best Halloween it's ever seen. My students didn't know all that much about it, so I enlightened them in class during the week before Halloween about what it was all about. This segued nicely into having the students tell scary stories. I wasn't sure how that would go, but a number of students were actually pretty good at it, and a few stories got genuine screams from the girls in class (meaning, the majority of the class). Knowing full well that if there was time at the end of class I would be asked to tell a story, I brushed up on "The Tell-Tale Heart" and ended up telling it to a few classes. I don't think any lesson I've done has gotten the students paying more attention to their classmates' presentations than this one.

Danielle, a Halloween fan, also had the idea of holding a Halloween party in her apartment with one of her favorite classes. Me and Gary teach that class as well, and we showed up in costume fashionably late. We could hear the party going on from several floors below, and everyone screamed (in delight?) when we came in. We came in at the tail-end of two students being wrapped in toilet paper, which the students would not tire of during the two hours, at one point wrapping their three foreign teachers together. We had previously had a foreign teacher pumpkin-carving party, and the students liked the pumpkins so much they asked to take them home. It was overall a big success, with bobbing for apples, numerous people being locked in the bathroom (for instance, me), and dancing to suggestive Jamie Fox songs.

After the party the three of us went out to give candy to strangers and visit Gary's friend's bar. Gary took the lead with the bowl of candy, and would approach random people on the street, especially those walking alone, and say nothing while holding out a piece of candy to them. He had the best and most frightening costume and the foreigners tend to be stared at uncertainly anyway, so he got mixed reactions. Some were amused and thanked him for the candy (to which he wouldn't respond), while many were having none of it and stayed at a safe distance. One English-speaking young man wanted to know where he was from, and he silently pointed up slowly towards the moon in response. There is a young boy who always stares at me with a worried expression in a restaurant I eat at regularly, and when we stopped in there he looked absolutely terrified.

But the best moment came when we brought Halloween to a recently opened restaurant nearby. This is probably one of the nicest restaurants in the city now, with three floors and a guard to keep an eye on the many cars. Me and Danielle hung back as Gary went in, and I saw what was coming, because the three uniformed young girls at the entrance had their heads turned the other way and at first didn't see us at all. When Gary was directly in front of them with arm outstretched, they turned around and simultaneously screamed at the top of their lungs and literally ran away. This of course had the full attention of the room full of businessmen and Party cadres, and a young man wearing a suit came over to Gary and said "thank you.... now leave quickly", while shooing him away with his hand. I felt it was quite an accomplishment for foreigners to be kicked out of a restaurant in small-town China.

It turned out that Gary's friend was not at his bar, and to our disappointment there were no other customers for us to freak out. I suppose it was a Tuesday night after all. However, the boss's gorgeous and very likeable girlfriend was there, and she got a great kick out of us, and hung out and took some photos with us. Most likely I'll be in Zhangye for Halloween next year, and if all goes well my American friends I met up with in Xi'an will be here as well, so I can only hope we top this year.

Some Boys Like to Collect Girls' Underwear

Learning Chinese is best undertaken by masochists. The spoken language has four tones, which must be pronounced clearly and accurately to be understand and to distinguish the many similar-sounding words (the sound shi can mean "to be", "ten", "time", "city", "to try", "an event", "lion", "wet", "teacher", "lose", "reality", "knowledge", "stone", "food", "arrow", "style", "the world", and many other things depending on context and pronounciation). It's the only major world language with no alphabet, and thousands of characters must be memorized before you can start reading and understanding Chinese. Mastering a word in spoken Chinese tells you nothing about how to write it, and there's no way to be certain of how to pronounce a character you've never seen before. Spoken and written Chinese are separate enough that it's like learning two difficult languages, and experts describe Chinese as around five times as difficult to learn as Spanish. Local dialects are so varied that Chinese people can find communication with people from other areas difficult. That said, I came here for a challenge, and I enjoy the punishment. I'm trying to re-double my efforts after losing ground while traveling, especially when I have trouble being understood and my Chinese teacher says things like "I see your listening hasn't improved over the summer."

Of course, learning English is no simple task for Chinese people, and all of them have to do it. They have the most difficult time doing it, as the total lack of grammatically correct English in public in China goes to show; even a large, fancy, and surely expensive hospital sign set in stone in Zhangye says "Zhangye city mumicipality." I could probably count the number of absolutely perfect English sentences my students have written on one hand. This week some students went over an old reading final exam with me, and some multiple-choice questions had either no right answer or several. Sometimes I have a very frustrating time getting my students not to speak Chinese when doing big groups activities, so I'll have to keep with smaller groups. One of these small group activities this week required students to answer the question "what is the strangest hobby you have heard of?". Many involved eating something, whether it was glass, soil, stones, or centipedes. A couple described things that would include my family - having a snake for a pet and enjoying fishing even if you don't catch anything. One shy boy stood up and said "I have heard that some boys like to collect girls' underwear."

My first few days back in Zhangye after traveling felt strangely underwhelming, but I knew once the teaching started my enthusiasm would pick back up. All in all I consider my students some of the most wonderful people I've met, and I enjoy things like office hours that ought to dreaded as "work." Usually an ideal group of only 4-10 people show up for my office hours, and last week's were particularly good, as a few students vented intelligently about some problems with Chinese teaching methods (namely, 'memorize and be quiet') being used for language and their appreciation of what the foreign teachers do. One of my favorite students wanted to ask if I knew about an English book she had heard about, that she wanted to look into because the main character was a rebel and older Chinese critics warned against it. She didn't know the English title, but she said the author's Chinese name was something like "Sha Lin Jia", and I immediately perked up and asked "do you mean Salinger??". She indeed meant The Catcher in the Rye, so I let her borrow the copy I brought, which made my day.

There is a holiday in China called Teacher's Day, which happened last Sunday. In America those kinds of holidays tend to get marked on a calendar somewhere and never brought up, but this one seems important in China. A few students stopped by to see me and give me fruit, and many called to wish me a happy Teacher's Day. Both of my new classes gave me nice gifts - a stylish thermos, and by far the most entertaining, a toy guitar that lights up and plays children's songs when you touch it. The English department also had an extravagant hot pot dinner for all its teachers, in which the foreigners were placed together in the same room and the few Chinese teachers joining us said little. There was also the expected 30-course banquet for welcoming the new teachers (an older couple from New Zealand via Northern Ireland and a young Peace Corps volunteer) a mere two days later.

Finally, there was another performance with the "Guitar Club" Saturday evening, which was mentioned to me in a phone call three hours beforehand. Luckily two student friends happened to be in my apartment, and Xiao Ma's garbled Chinese was translated to me. This was at the Zhangye Medical College, a few of whose students I have met through the teacher Julian last term. Being nursing rather than English majors, they made my students sound like members of the House of Lords. Perhaps because they get less entertainment than Hexi (not that it's exactly a non-stop party here) they were so enthusiastic as to give the impression Chinese people do like rock music. I was told to play a song on my own towards the end, and Xiao Ma felt the need to summon an English-speaking teacher on stage to talk to me. She started with ni hao (hello), so I said ni hao in return, which was all it took to excite the crowd. She said in English, "your Chinese is very good!", and as I haven't let learned "don't patronize me" in Chinese, I only replied "I think it's just ok." I was asked to tell the audience about myself, and had to ignore Xiao Ma's scolding in my right ear about not saying it in English; I'm here as a teacher, not a novelty act. Though I've matured well past the point of enjoying guitar heroics, after so many performances of strumming on a barely-audible acoustic to songs that are absolutely boring for me to play, combined with many listless hours among a group I can't communicate well with, I felt a patriotic duty to show them how we play in America, and pulled out every obnoxious rock star behind-the-head-as-fast-as-possible-show-off move I could remember. This went over well, and someone shouted something like "one more song, how about it!", so I played and sang the one White Stripes song I know the words to, which received noticeably less enthusiastic applause. The quest to find an English singer has begun in earnest.

Dragon Boat Festival, sans Boats or Dragons

There happened to be back-to-back holidays last week: first the Dragon Boat Festival, and then Children's Day on June 1st. The main feature of the Dragon Boat Festival are the dragon boat races, which in the middle of a desert are of course non-existent, so people here just eat the traditional zongzi (glutinous rice wrapped in bamboo leaves) and tie string around friends' wrists for good luck (no one told me I was supposed to wear it for a month so I cut the first one off immediately the next morning). For Children's Day I spent the afternoon in Ganquan Park, for the first time in Zhangye fighting through a crowd, for tickets into the park. One of the more maddening Chinese habits is the lack of lines: if a lot of people want something at once it turns into complete chaos. I told my students we should have had the day off because they are often as excitable as children. Last week also had a few amusing moments in class as I taught them American slang and had them use it; there's something wonderful about a job that involves hearing "let's go the canteen, it's totally fabulous. The food is to die for" from a Chinese English student. There was also a group that had obviously learned some slang from somewhere else, but God knows where, as they ended a skit about a bothersome friend by telling him "Fuck off!". Me and Andrew also finally saw the student dorms: eight beds to a room, no desks (certainly not things like computers), and washing clothes by hand in a basin (they often just wear the same clothes everyday).

It's always entertaining to be at the mercy of non-native English speakers. On Saturday a trip was arranged for the foreign teachers by Miss Mao, and we didn't really know what was coming next until we saw it with our own eyes. She had first told me only "we will go to an interesting place... meet at the big tree at 8:30", so she had me hooked from the start. On the bus (we had no idea we were taking a private bus, even after seeing the bus sitting on the campus) she expanded that to "we will go to the countryside.... the hills are different colors". If I had any reservations before, now I was definitely excited. The second and most random stop (there would be many) involved us getting out to look at an office building for a farmer's union for approximately 2.5 minutes, and then getting right back on the bus. After a number of short stops at farmers' homes (more interesting than the union building), we eventually arrived at our destination, which after all was a pretty spectacular landspace of large multi-colored clay formations out in the middle of nowhere (well, even more out in the middle of nowhere). That's the closest thing I've seen to the American West; most likely I'll end up being better travelled in China than America. Lunch was fancy and elaborate (wouldn't have it any other way) - two of the notorious "big plate of chicken" dishes were just the appetizers. I also met Miss Chen, the reclusive teacher from Hong Kong, for the first time. I had had three dramatic sitings of her without seeing her face, and I half-hoped I would go the entire term without meeting one of the foreign teachers (and no one is sure why she is considered a foreign teacher).

In the continuing series of children's performances in the square, I caught a few minutes of what turned out to be Snow White. Chinese children are amusing when dressed in silly costumes, but I think none more so than as the Seven Dwarves. I was mobbed by about 15 senior middle school students in the audience, who fetched another 15 or so and their teacher to come talk to me. Chinese people are probably the most complimentary on Earth; foreigners that can speak any Chinese in China are praised with "your Chinese is great!"; foreigners in America that have any trouble speaking English are often despised.

Also in the square, I had one of my better language adventures so far. An old man was writing calligraphy on the pavement with a water brush, so me and MoMo went to watch. When he found out I knew a little Chinese he and a few passer-bys watched in amusement as I wrote some characters on the pavement. So he started writing sentences to me, such as "which country are you from?", which I in turn answered with the brush. It certainly didn't hurt that MoMo was there to help me. When he left, he didn't say anything, writing only "goodbye, American friend".

Children's Day

Children's Day is June 1st in China, so every Sunday evening this month there will be a performance in the square from a different school. Last Sunday was the start, with very entertaining dance and music performances from small children in silly costumes. A group of children milling around the audience in costume noticed me, so I ended up getting 20 children interrogating me from every direction.

In the interest of saving money (this being a school which takes its students out of class to clean the campus) there are sometimes power cuts, another item on the long list of "things you will never be told about in advance". This is usually in the afternoon, because the Chinese like to have a "xiuxi" (rest) and sleep during the three-hour lunch break in the afternoon (yes, three hours). So, they assume you couldn't possibly have a good use for electricity in the afternoon, such as, say, being in the middle of a final exam on the computer that's due that afternoon, as I was yesterday. Luckily I had saved my work, and I waited around for two-and-a-half hours until the power was turned back on. I called Miss Mao to ask when they might be turning the power on, and she obviously had no idea they had turned it off in the first place. It's a pretty good lifestyle here, as long as you don't expect things to be run half as smoothly as they are back home. Cynthia, the American professor, probably gets the most frustrated here, and Gary joked that "she thinks she's still at a university".