Community Engagement

I am trying to figure out what activity I should peg down as my "community engagement project" as required for my Fulbright, so this week I tried out some different activities.

On Wednesday, I went back to Kung Fu. The gym where I used to practice is under construction for the 2014 Youth Olympic Games (YOG as they like to call it here in Nanjing). One of the CIEE students, Gennady, and I took the bus to the Yunjin Meidi neighborhood, and started asking everyone we saw where the kung fu, or 散打, place was. It was like playing connect the dots. We would ask one person, they would point us in the right direction, and then we would find the next person and ask, showing them the address Ping Ping had sent on our phones. Most of the people we talked to didn't speak Mandarin, so we had to use hand gestures. Finally, we found it inside a gated community (we had to convince the guards that we were going there to exercise.) The class was alright, but I decided not to go back for numerous different reasons, one being that the class got boring.

 So I continued my search. I'm doing a language exchange with a 13-year old boy in his home every Saturday. His mom was over-eager like every single other Chinese mother I have ever met, one minute saying how terrible English her son had, and one minute asking me eagerly, "How is his English?" With a searching look that only wanted to hear one answer" "Your son's English is very good." The fact that her son went to the best middle school in Nanjing was only mentioned about 15 times. I have to admit the son was very adorable, and they invited me to eat lunch with them ("The food I cook tastes so bad, doesn't it? You're not used to eating Chinese food, are you? I didn't make enough, did I?"), so I can't complain. The only other strange thing about the house was that there were huge, framed photographs of the mother in various unflattering poses all over the walls of each room.

Here are some pictures from another family I have a language exchange with:

Lucy and me, one of my students from last year

I had to include this picture of Lucy's grandma because she is just too cute, always making me lunch, bringing me tea and fruit. She is partially blind.

I also started playing ping pong with my roommate each weekend for 3 hours. It's a blast. My roommate is a serious professional, but he is super patient when he plays with me and hits the ball slowly. I am getting noticeably better already. He said today, "With practice each week for the next 6 months, you should start to show some improvement."

Playing some serious ping pong

Li Hua and me

Ping pong court on campus

Ping Pong stadium on campus! 

Chinese word of the day:

自信 - zixin - literally "believe in yourself" aka confidence