A Day in the Life

A Day in the Life of Me (Winter version):

Some exciting developments in Old Nanjing have occurred during the past couple of days:

1. I turned on my refrigerator.  

2. I took a shower in my house without crying.

3. I put on sunscreen.

4. I worked on the computer without needing to stop to heat my frozen fingers on a hot water bottle. In fact, I've stopped using my hot water bottle.

5. I only wore 4 layers today (as opposed to my usual 12 layer combo) and even had to take one layer off while biking. I think I might have even felt the warmth of the sun on my face and saw the blue sky.

6. The smell of sewage is noticeably more pungent.

Does this mean that, after 3 months of ardent anticipation for the feeling that is called "warm", that spring is actually coming? I couldn't be more thrilled.

One important aspect of ethnography is to observe the changes of behaviour, habits, and life patterns that occur along with the change of the seasons. This is one reason why many ethnographers will live in their field site for at least a year. As Julian Murchison writes in his book Ethnography Essentials, a field manual that has served as my bible for the past 6 months, being able to observe a full calendar cycle is invaluable: "Having access to a full cycle of events (shaped by perhaps the calendar year or seasons) can be very important to many projects... A researcher who is not in a position to observe these temporal differences may not fully understand the larger circumstances and might mistakenly assume that one period like Pentecost or the dry season [or winter] is representative of general behaviour and life. Therefore, doing research for at least a year will allow you to see and experience the most representative range of your field sites"(Murchison 89). This was one of the many reasons I decided to move into Old Nanjing during the winter. Indeed, as I personally discovered, living in an old house in the winter is not a pleasant experience and I saw changes in the neighborhood: while doors were open and people were out walking and chatting on the street during autumn, doors were closed and people were grumpy in the winter. Chinese people also have some ingenious ideas about how to stay warm in the winter, including but not exclusive to wearing their thick, fleece padded pajamas with feather down coats at all times and avoiding the shower. Luckily, thanks to the 10-month Fulbright grant, I will be able to observe all four seasons in Old Nanjing.

Before winter officially comes to a close, I'd like to share a snapshot of "A Day in the Life of Sarah in Old Nanjing during the Winter." As the weather slowly warms up, my daily routines have already started to change, and I'm sure they'll change again with the heat and humidity of summer. This is a practice in the detailed storytelling of (auto) ethnography.  

I wake up around 7 am every morning to the sound of school children cursing and screaming the Nanjing dialect as they gather outside before the start of school (I live across the street from a junior high). It is kind of comforting, just hearing the kids laughing and talking, and I think to myself, "and that's China's future." It reminds me of my own days as a young student, when life revolved around the drama of classroom life: who liked whom that week and who was holding hands with whom that day. It reminds me, as I sleep under my cocoon of blankets in a pretend world of warmth and solitude, that the clock is still ticking, that time is still going, that the world is still turning. Instrumental music indicating a sense of urgency signals the start of the school day and the period changes every 50 minutes after that. During the day, people screaming into a microphone during periodic school assemblies pierce my thin walls.

I have to pee, but I don't want to leave my warm haven of three thick, heavy blankets, and lay there for an hour or two drifting in and out of sleep as Chinese pop music from Wang Xiaohong's thrift shop next door penetrates the morning din. Eventually I can't hold it any longer, and I get out of bed and put on my shoes. I grab my keys and several sheets of toilet paper and put them in my pocket. As I take the 4-minute walk to the public toilet, I field questions coming at me from all sides as I pass the neighbors: "Did you just get up? Are you cold? Have you eaten yet? Don't you have class today? Are you going to go out today?" I eventually make it to the toilet, and while squatting across the two rows of tiles that form a trough over a slanted tunnel system, a woman asks, "Hey, Beautiful Girl, what country are you from?" We have a short conversation about why I'm in China. After I'm finished, I see a friendly grandma and she asks rhetorically if my parents miss me a lot. I walk back with my neighbor Liu Baoyu, nicknamed "Auntie Fatty" (pang ayi... and no, I'm not joking. People actually call her that), who says she came looking for me to hang out last night but I wasn't home. We talk about how cold it is, and Auntie Fatty says that this year has been a particularly terrible winter. A grandma angrily scolds me for not wearing enough, yelling that I'm going to catch a cold. I show her that I'm bundled up to the point where I can barely move, but she furrows her brows and shakes her finger at me, telling me that I need to wear more. 

I make it back home and begin making breakfast of an egg-spinach-sausage omelette. I leave the door open, and neighbors come and go as they please, making comments like, "You're not eating rice? Wait, you're not eating any kind of starch? That is not okay. How is that okay? You don't eat a starch? Can you get full on just eggs and meat? That's crazy. What you're eating is crap. You should eat healthier things, like steamed buns. That's why you've gotten so fat recently. You don't eat rice." A grandma scolds me for drinking cold water and tells me I'm going to get stomach cancer if I keep it up. Much to my delight, the grandma next door brings over some chicken soup for me.

After breakfast, I check on my laundry hanging out on the line.  My clothes are stiff-- the laundry has frozen on the line. It's weird, because the wrinkles are frozen too, frozen in time, like someone pressed the pause button on the TV.  I take a walk in the park and do some qi gong, chatting with some of the grandpas and grandmas. I take a stroll around the neighborhood, and I talk to the residents about our financial situations. They advise me to take up an English teaching job to make more money. I go to the market and pick up some fruit and groceries (usually chicken and vegetables for dinner, plus egg-pork danjiao dumplings for the morning). I walk around the neighborhood, through the narrow alleys, chatting with friends, and conducting informal interviews if need be. I practice speaking in the Nanjing dialect with them. I stop by Wang Xiaohong's thrift shop to chat and she looks exhausted and complains about the cold. When I suggest she buy a space heater, she scoffs and tells me that would be a waste of electricity.

I come home and write my field notes on what happened that day. I curse the cold. While I work, the next-door neighbors talk loudly in the Nanjing dialect next door, while vendors of all kinds—fruit, vegetable, recycling and scrap, fixers, and household goods—pass through periodically, yelling "Tomatoes for sale! Recycle your microwave! Fix your broken radio!"

I write and write and write until I can't stand it anymore and I either go to practice Brazilian Jiu-jitsu, or go on a run. If I go to BJJ, then the next 5 hours involve a subway ride, conditioning, drills, grappling and (usually) a hot shower. Here's a video of me.

If I workout on my own, I jog in the bike line while silent mo-peds wiz past me and children riding backwards on their parents' bikes point and yell, "Foreigner!" I get to the track at Nanjing University and join the rest of the grandmas and grandpas in a few laps around the track. I do sprint intervals while dodging toddlers, flying soccer balls, and men running in winter coats, jeans, and dress shoes. I do some pull-ups, push-ups, and squats. People give me thumbs up and tell me I'm fierce. A man approaches and says that I'm the strongest woman he's ever seen and that "Chinese women are not okay" (tamen dou bu xing). I insist that I'm quite average. I jog home.

When I get home, I enter a meditative state where I become both physically and emotionally numb. I call it hyper-robot mode. I complete the next steps as quickly as I possibly can, repeating the mantra, "This will all be over soon" over and over in my head. I start the kettle with boiling water so that I'll have some drinking water when I'm done with my shower. I turn on the gas, and then turn on the shower. A clicking noise emanates from a box on the wall next to the shower and a fire ignites inside, which heats the water as it passes through the pipes. I crouch down to reach the spicket that comes up to my shoulders to wet my hair. The water is warm on my freezing hands, but it feels cold on my head. I quickly shampoo and rinse off. When I turn off the water, I scream curse words in English as my entire body trembles and steam emanates off my skin. I thank the gods that I brought my super thick towel from the US and quickly dry off, running upstairs to the bedroom to put on 12 layers of clothes on top of thermal underwear. I dry my hair and breathe a sigh of relief. The torture of showering is done.

I drink the water I boiled, then start another kettle to fill up my hot water bottle, a little miniature heater I carry with me everywhere I go. I make dinner, usually soup or some other vegetable-meat combo, and curse my freezing cold hands and the olive oil that has congealed. I share the meal with my roommate if she is home and we chat about college life and her (now ex) boyfriend. She comments that eating soup in the winter time is nice because it warms your entire body. 

My neighbor Big Brother Guo screams my Chinese name (Tian Ran) to call me over, and I go over to his house to chat, snack on peanuts and sunflower seeds, and read the newspaper with his wife and his 5-year old daughter. They ask if I'm eating enough and if I'm cold these days. Big Sister Chongyang complains about how cold it is and how much she hates having to wear so many layers all the time. Big Brother Guo helps me with some new vocabulary in the Nanjing dialect and I help his daughter with English. We hang out until 10 pm, his daughter's bedtime. I go home and prepare my bed for the night by turning on the electric blanket and filling up my hot water bottle again. I work on my notes, blog, or article for the day, and curl up in bed to read a book (usually about China) or watch a Chinese soap opera until I drift off to sleep.

This is a typical day. Particularly cold days are spent in coffee shops, and some days are spent in the library, poring over Chinese academic journals or listening to interview transcripts... over and over and over again. But for the most part, this is what my winter looks like. 

Chinese words of the day:

滑雪－hua2 xue3- literally, "to slip over the snow" aka skiing

冰球- bing1 qiu2- literally, "ice ball" aka hockey