La vie quotidienne

I was reminded the other evening, while talking to another teacher here, that one of the joys in China is the pleasure of sitting around and simply watching things happen.  Here, for your viewing pleasure, a couple more videos of life on the basketball court next to the primary school on a Sunday afternoon, circa late September / early October.

Part the first:  In which Z tools around randomly on his bike, Y follows two girls that come by with a kitten in a small box, a random passerby talks on her cell phone, and a clump of children then run off to points unknown...



Part the second:  In which Z and friend play a Pokemon-type game with small circular trading cards, Y experiments with a plastic fake guitar, and someone in the background says ”对“ ("dui" = right, okay) repeatedly so fast that it almost sounds like machine gun fire.


Part the third:  In which Y shreds on the toy guitar, Z loses a round of rock/paper/scissors, and a toddler and her mom take their leave. 

Hide and Seek

Ah, the things that Jane's been missing...

Since Jane has now been away from campus for more than two months, I thought it might be time for a timely update on happenings around town.


Presenting our University's brand new green electric intra-campus shuttles!  At the beginning of the school year, all of a sudden they were all over the place, whisking students from the back gate to the central classroom area, or from the side gate to the south gate (we're big on gates here), all for one Yuan.  Like crosses between oversized golf carts and a pack of wild dingoes with their vocal chords removed (large green and white electric wild dingoes with wheels and 12 to 15 seats), these minibusses now roam the narrow streets of the teacher apartment area.  I think the drivers must be working on commission - they make NYC bike messengers look relaxed by comparison.  As an added bonus, the open seating gives the opportunity for college girls from the far reaches of campus who haven't seen our kids before a brief chance to shriek "How cuuuuute!" and "Hello, boy!" as the bus whizzes by, almost grazing our elbows.

Other than that, the changes around campus this fall have been fairly minor.  A slight majority of parents and grandparents of babies and toddlers are now using strollers to push their kids around, instead of carrying their kid in the traditional wicker basket backpack.  When we first arrived, and Ysa was still most definitely stroller-dependent, we were the only family on campus that used one, and that only because our frame pack was killing a sore ankle I had at the time.  Are we trendsetters or are we trendsetters?  (The correct answer to that question, by the way, is "probably not".)


There are now more of these guys around who jump over curbs and things with their bicycles, who I call, for lack of a better name, "Jumping Bicycle Dudes".  I first noticed the first two Jumping Bicycle Dudes on campus the spring after we arrived, and since then their numbers have grown to around twelve, I'd say.  They seem to have been driven indoors by the colder weather and (maybe?) pressure to study, but I'm thinking that next spring, they may double yet again to around 24 when it gets warmer. 

Found in translation

Here's a challenge:  Can I decipher the note from my son's first grade teacher before my son finishes his homework?  Before you answer, here's the note:

"我校定于本周五开秋季学生运动会，请家长于周五早上8：10分准时送孩子了到校，中午11：00到校接孩子。下午不到校。
请家长勿必协助做好以不工作：
1。周五必须穿上校服。请家长检查校服拉链坏的及时修理。
2。请家长为孩子准备一双白色运动鞋（周五穿）
3。长发女孩子要求马尾辫 （高一些）；
4。 男孩子头发长了，请家长带去理发。做到清清爽爽。
谢谢客位家长！"

Piece of cake, right?  I suppose I could have asked a student or an English-speaking neighbor for help, but since I already had the online dictionary and Google translate up on the computer, Zekey and I spent a fun half hour working together figuring out which character said what. 

(For those uninitiated into the wonders of typing Chinese on the computer:  if you know a character's pronunciation, you can simply type it into the computer, choose the character you want, and there it is.  Unless you've got the pronunciation wrong, of course.  If you don't know what a character sounds like, then you can draw it using your mouse into an online dictionary, and that will give you several character choices, one of which will hopefully be correct.  Before computers, you would have had to look up a character by its most important stroke, or radical, and hope that you find the right one. This is where I get very jealous of anyone learning a language that has a phonetic alphabet...)

Anyway, since that was a thirty minute investment in basic data entry, I thought I'd share the results that Google Translate came up with:

Our school is scheduled to open Friday games fall students, parents Friday morning at 8:10 am sharp to send their children to the school, the school at 11:00 to pick up their kids. Not at school.
Please parents do not do will help to not work:
1. Friday must wear school uniform. Please check the school uniform zipper bad parents timely repairs.
2. Please prepare a pair of white parents to their children shoes (wear Friday)
3. Asked a girl with long hair ponytail (higher);
4. Long hair, boys, parents bring haircut. So cool-cool.
Thank you class parents!

Poetry, no?  Certainly much better than anything I could do on my own...

Taken at the crossroads

A couple of pictures from the main intersection just outside the side gate of the university where we live.

Ordinary Stuff - Grinding away

- Six to eight students per dormitory room.
- Around fourteen, and sometimes up to twenty, different classes in the course of a single week.
- An educational philosophy that emphasizes the mastery of an existing field of information, often accomplished by memorization.

= People Studying Everywhere. 

Here, an unused lecture hall in the first floor of the fourth teaching building that I pass on my way back home after my Tuesday class, which gets out at six.  If it's cloudy, which means most always, the class gets out right around dusk.  The classrooms are the most brightly lit spaces on campus, spilling their light out onto the rapidly dimming sidewalks as most of the students head to the campus cafeterias for dinner.

The entrance to the kids' primary school

Now with 50% more weeds and trees growing above it.  I think I'm justified if I tell Zekey to run at top speed every time he enters or leaves the building, right?

Foreground/Background

Two Years Ago - Bridge over changing waters

2009:



2011:



2009:



2011:

Two Years Ago - settling in

Some of the first shots of our university that Jane took out of the car window as we first came on to campus to drop off our stuff before heading off to language training, followed by what they look like now:

2009:


2011:


2009:


2011:


Here, the change in the photos aren't terribly big, but the changes in our minds are huge. The first picture from 2009 is of a random building. The first picture from 2011 is the 西华大学第三食堂.（Xihua Daxue di san shitang - Xihua University cafeteria #3, which, according to students, is the cafeteria with the best food, though it's a bit more expensive.)

The next picture from 2009 is a fence with some bikes in the foreground and some buildings behind it. The corresponding image from 2011, on the other hand, is nothing other than the University's side gate, which is:

• where we pick up our organic vegetables twice weekly,
• where we're 95% likely to run into a friend or a student if we stand there for more than five minutes,
• our passage to cheap restaurants if we're too lazy to cook,
• the way to the market, the stationary store, the hair salon and the bus,
• and, in the words of a previous foreign teacher who blogged before we got here, "the place where the University ends and the Real China begins".

What a difference two years makes, huh?

Two Years Ago - the vanishing playground

Two Years Ago - the shop by the bridge

2009:



2011:

Two Years Ago!

Two years ago at this time, we were in Pennsylvania at a training conference, headed via Chicago to China at the end of July. Now, two years later, we're in China, headed via Chicago to Pennsylvania at the end of July. I was looking though our umpteen million stored photos on our computer in my never-ending quest to free up space on our hard drive, and I was struck by how much some things have changed since then.



So, I've been setting off around campus to revisit a few sites that I first photographed two years ago, to get the "after" version of things. (Not that anything is finished mind you - just in a further stage of development...) Coming in the next couple of days or weeks then, a few posts on 2009 vs. 2011. Isn't time travel fun?

The first and final voyage of the SS Styrofoam

One Saturday, about a month ago, Xander and Zekey decided that they wanted to go sailing. More specifically, they wanted to launch a boat that they (well, mostly Xander) had made. One of their ongoing projects this spring has been the making and testing of various kinds of Lego and styrofoam watercraft in the big red plastic washbasin in our bathroom, but it seemed like they were ready to move on to bigger and better.

So the four of us (Ysa included) trooped across campus to the "fake mountain place", as it's known in our household. One typical feature of Chinese universities that I've neglected to describe up to this point is the artificial landscaped garden, usually featuring pavilions and a pond of some sort with some craggy rocks (natural or otherwise) in the middle, surrounded by groves of bamboo.

As you can imagine, three blonde children walking across campus taking turns carrying a chunk of cardboard and styrofoam almost as big as they are isn't exactly a common sight in most Chinese universities, so by the time we got to the pond, we had a small crowd of onlookers ready to witness the launch. Xander proved to be a fine MC.



After the launch, there was the small matter of getting the boat back to shore, which was soon solved with the help of some of the aforementioned bamboo. The boys, and a young onlooker or two, started poling and prodding the boat around the vast wide ocean (or small stagnant pond, depending on your point of view). I left with Ysa to go to a nearby ATM, and when I got back, the number of boats in the lake had magically doubled!





The adventure continued through the morning, until a combination of distraction and soggy cardboard brought our small fleet into drydock. A fine seaside morning in our landlocked little campus.

All's Fair

Every March 16th, our local "village" of 红光（Hongguang, pop. ca. 280,000) celebrates the anniversary of a visit by Chairman Mao, who stopped by this area (then called Hexing) in 1958 to visit a few collective farms and to talk with the locals. He suggested a few changes, told the provincial government to set up a university in the area, and the rest is history. After the visit, the residents of our town changed the name to mean "Red light" - Honguang in Chinese.

The celebration took the form of an immensely long county fair / shopping bazaar, which stretched along ten blocks of a side street not far from the University. Of course, we were there, and Jane and I found ourselves continually asking each other for the camera, because there were all sorts of picture-worthy sights (and sites). Here are a few of the better ones... (as always, click on the photo to enlarge)

Excuse me, have you seen our kids?

Ah, what a difference a year makes! It's hard to remember exactly, but a year ago at this time, as the weather was getting colder, the kids were either complaining to us that they were bored or cycling through the same five or six bootlleg Pixar movies on DVD in a state of zombielike rapture. We prioritized and sorted multiple Christmas requests to the grandparents. More construction sets! Good workbooks! Chapter books in English! And multiple trips (organized by Jane) into Chengdu to get our kids playing and socializing with other expat kids so they wouldn't drive each other crazy here at home.

Fast forward to the present.
"Umm, Jane, do you know where Zekey is?"
"Isn't he over at Yang DongQi's?"
"No, I called, and they said they haven't seen him since this afternoon."
"Maybe with - who's the kid at the end of the block...?"

You get the idea. Our boys are now bona fide social butterflies, with Ysa trailing only because she's three, and we don't let her go out on her own yet. Most every day after school, they're over at friends' houses, out building forts out of spare paving blocks and rubble (see photo), playing in traffic, and so on. All of the things that Jane and I did when we were allowed to run wild in the suburban fringes of the seventies, in other words, except safer, because everyone (and I mean everyone) knows Who They Are and Where They Live.

Which leaves me feeling happy, spoiled, and just a teeny bit bewildered, especially when back in the States, you can apparently get threatened by police if you let your eight year old play in the park by himself. Happy because, duh, my kids are happy. Spoiled, and a bit guilty, because up to this point, other parents are doing the lion's share of the hosting, even if we try to offer otherwise. (Being nervous about letting your kid play with someone who doesn't speak much Chinese, I suspect, along with a big dose of wanting to have your kid play with the Americans - the privilege of the foreigner, I suppose. Sigh.)

Bewildered, because, yes, because we seem to be typical immigrants. Our children are becoming much more immersed in the culture than we are, simply because they: a) are better than us at soaking up the language, b) are a heck of a lot cuter than I am, c) are, I suspect, watching lots of Chinese kids' TV, and d) don't have to teach English all day for a living. Do I sound jealous about now?

So they come home from school singing songs that we can't understand, with photocopied notes to the parents that we can barely decipher. (Did they want us to send a grocery bag with Ysa to school tomorrow, or should we take her grocery shopping over the weekend...?) Best, though, are the hysterical giggling fits that I can only catch the general gist of - if I understand anything at all, that is.

So yes, we're in a foreign country, and our children are interacting with this country in ways that are new, exciting, wonderful, and to us, unimaginable.

Guess that about sums up parenting in a nutshell, doesn't it?

Off to work on a grey morning

A view from the top of the sixth teaching building, where I teach my classes. Mondays and Tuesdays, the classes start at eight, which seems fairly early now, as the sun doesn't start coming up until a bit after seven. Since it's 6:55 now, I'll let the picture do the rest of the talking for today.

Ordinary Stuff - Cute pens

Continuing with the strange childhood vibe for a bit, a selection of pens from our local stationary store.



I can't pretend to be able to explain the phenomenon of "Asian Cute", but I'm here to say that it's alive and well, at least in certain sectors of the retail market, anyway. Sometimes it veers into, well, not surreal territory, but uncanny, at least.



Not enough cute for the day? You can check out a few more here on Flickr. (giggle! ^_^)