http://mysite.verizon.net/Letter_from_China
Letter from China
is a poignant and irreverent diary of the author's yearlong (2001-2) experience
of teaching English to college students in Beijing,
People’s Republic of China. From the very first pages, the author draws
you into his struggle with a culture worlds away from
his comfort zone. The author’s generous
and compelling personality allowed him to gain access to the lives of his
students and their families, who became characters in his tale. One can experience
the author’s wit and humanity throughout the narrative.
The author's humorous view of China
is especially timely and dovetails with the current explosion of interest in that
country as it enters the modern world. The
book is neither a travelogue nor a look at the government, although elements of
those subjects are woven into the story.
Instead, it is an engaging look at China,
tailored toward those who know little about it.
Still, those who have lived and/or traveled there will also enjoy the
book as it reminds them of the absurdities they, too, experienced.
Week Seventeen
Greetings Once Again from Beijing!
... where I am wishing that the
dragon king’s daughter hadn’t married the human being.
This past week was February 2nd
(our calendar, not yours), and the weather turned cold and rainy: TingTing
explained to me that a long time ago, there was in the heavens a very big and
very powerful dragon king. He married another dragon and they had a daughter.
It happened that in outward appearance, the young daughter dragon looked like a
human being. One day, on February 2nd in fact, she married a real human being.
Her mother was very sad about this and shed a great, cold tear that came to
earth as bad weather. Thus, each year at this time we have bad weather again. I
don’t know if this is true or not, but it was colder than a dragon’s butt here
last week!
I now have a weekly poker night
with the girls. I kept asking Victor and
Bill, but they were like, "Huh?"
Now, Jennifer and two of her friends, Han Dong and Chang Fei, who don’t
speak English (but who love to gamble!) come over. The other two girls can now say,
"fold," "check" and "raise" (what a good teacher
I am!), and when someone raises two jiao, everybody goes "ewww" and
folds. I found some microwave popcorn at
PriceSmart, which they like but want me to put sugar on, for some reason. One beer lasts two hours between all of them.
Jennifer came by today. She told
me she was riding on the 503 bus this morning and a man, who thought she wasn’t
looking, tried to reach into her purse and steal her wallet. Her reaction? She just gave him a quick dirty look and got
up and went to another part of the bus. "You didn’t yell, ‘Thief!
Thief!’?" I asked. Oh, no, nobody would ever do that in China.
We would never want to cause a commotion.
People are very private here. Jennifer went on to say that, for example,
if a person falls into a lake and starts to drown, he better hope there are at
least 100 people around. This would increase only slightly the chance that
somebody might actually attempt to save him. If it ain’t your business, they
ain’t interested here. I "thank my lucky stars" that I’m not at the
bottom of last week’s manhole!
My student, May, was visiting the
other night, and I sneezed twice in succession She said, "Someone is
cursing you." Huh? Apparently in China,
if you sneeze once, someone is missing you.
If you sneeze twice, someone is cursing you. Three times means somebody is talking about
you. If you sneeze four times, you have
a cold!
The sound of channel surfing in
China: "Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, China’s entry into the WTO,
blah, blah, blah, China’s winning bid for the Olympics, blah, blah,
blah." Actually, China
is about to become the third country to put a man into space, and there are
plans for a space station quite soon.
Also, the ten-year plan calls for China
to have a colony on the moon. I’ve been teasing my students, "Okay, how
much you give me for the Moon? Ten
billion
