A Few Funny Quotes from Abroad

"Your haircut is really out of style. We like the bangs cut straight across, not sideswept like yours." -hairdresser

"Besides being concerned about where you are from, Chinese people always have to ask how much money you make, what your parents do for a living, if you own a house or a car, and how much you spend on rent and tuition. This is important so you can find out about the person's family background and if the person a potential future mate (if the opposite sex)." -friend

"Do you think there are other life forms in the universe? Do you think they have ever visited the planet Earth?" -13-year old language partner, in English during an interview exercise. A philosophical discussion about Transformers then ensued.

"In China, it is the parents' duty to continue giving money to their children, even after they [the children] get married. Parents will give all their money to their children if they can, or at least they will buy them a house." -friend

"I'm learning Arabic now because the Middle East is becoming an important player in China's foreign relations considering their huge petroleum reserves." -friend

"I apply for jobs for eight hours every day. There are too many people in China, we live in "hard mode." Americans live in "easy mode." -friend

"I asked an American once about their dating culture. He said that they don't use introductions and they don't necessarily date their classmates. He said that you just find a girlfriend on your own, maybe by walking up and saying hi. I still don't understand how this is possible." -sociology professor, half-joking

Academics

Chinese university students are so incredibly nice. It is also insane how polite they are to their teachers and how attentive they are in class. It is the complete opposite of American students, who are either asleep or trying to argue with their teacher.

If a student gets called on in class, they must stand and they must respond, even if they don't know the answer. They also remain standing as the teacher corrects them (if the answer is wrong), and must remain standing until the teacher tells them to sit down. Sometimes this means standing for more than 5 minutes. This is in my graduate level courses...

The students would never dare to leave class early or tell the teacher the class went over time. One of my classes last week was supposed to be done at 8:30 pm. The students sat attentively until 9:15 pm, when the teacher looked at his watch, said "Oh, sorry I'm over time," and then continued teaching for another 10 minutes.

Here is a picture of my view from one of the classrooms:

If you look closely you can see the Golden Arches of McDonald's glowing in the middle. I live in one of the apartments with a red roof in the middle.

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

Seeing Old Friends

On Thursday, September 8, I had two classes, but for both of them the teachers didn't show up. The first one was Chinese Society Behavioral Analysis, with an apparently really famous Chinese sociologist named Zhai Xuewei. I sat next to these two really nice girls who talked to me. Eventually someone came to tell us that the teacher had forgot he had class this week.

The next class was Urban Archeology and Culture with the Chinese archeologist who wrote me a letter of affiliation (aka an invitation from Nanjing University) for my Fulbright application, He Yunao. I went to the wrong building at first and looked everywhere for the classroom, asking every security guard in sight, but by the time I found the classroom, it was dark and nobody was there. Gao Min called a friend to ask about the class, and his friend told him that the class just wasn't meeting this week.

When I met up with my friends for dinner that night, everyone said I had gotten prettier and lost weight. I have a feeling that they were just flattering me (how does one get prettier exactly?), but it was nice anyway. At one point, Ping Ping's husband asked why I wasn't eating much, and I replied that my stomach wasn't used to Chinese food yet.* Gao Min then turned to ask me, "How did you lose weight in the US? I thought everyone got fat when you went to the US. I just don't understand how this is possible." :-/ Ping Ping defended me by saying my life was bitter (辛苦) in the States, that I worked at a grocery store and lived an hour outside of the city, and this was how I lost weight. Afterward, I gave my friends some things I had brought them from the States, a book, some Clinique products, and the cookies and brownies. They said the brownies were good, but I was afraid they had gone bad by that point. My friend John was also excited about the granola bars I brought him.

*Later I realized that I probably shouldn't have said this, and should have just pretended to eat more, as they had gone out to dinner especially to welcome me back to Nanjing, and it was a little rude to say that I didn't eat Chinese food. I was embarrassed. 

Changes in Nanjing

Here are pictures of my view outside the window from my room: 

The apartment building in front of mine

You can see the little park on the bottom where senior citizens go to exercise. 

 Mostly, Nanjing is exactly the same as when I left. The main difference (in terms of environment and surroundings) from a couple years ago to this year is that there are at least three times as many foreigners in Nanjing now. This is especially prevalent in the neighborhood where I live, Gu Lou, because this is where the university is located. As a result they renovated one of the buildings across from the foreign students dorm. Here are pictures to compare: 

February 2010, when Ice Bing was being renovated into Talking

August 2011, the outside is completely different.

Happy Lady is the store in between the two Talkings

  

With the Talking expansion, they kicked out one of the vendors. There was one vendor called Happy Lady (兴旺), and we nicknamed the guy next to her Happy Man. I wasn't there, but the story goes that one day when they were renovating, they kicked out Happy Man because his shop was "sticking out." I don't remember his shop sticking out, but I think they replaced him with another Talking bar. 

Apparently, Happy Man was just standing there in the middle of the street with all his stock... they literally just kicked him out one day without notice. So everyone in the foreign students dorms came out and bought up his leftover stock. He said thank you to everyone and said everything was going to be okay because he would open up a shop somewhere else. That story made me cry because he was my favorite vendor ever and his baby son would hang around sometimes in the summer. Now that Happy Lady doesn't have any competition, she expanded her store to three times the size and raised some of the prices. 

 

Some other differences I noticed:

-less staring

-more big dogs, especially Labradors

-more expensive

-iPad2 obsession
-more body tattoos 

I love Chinese people

My flatmate, Li Hua, is possibly the nicest and nerdiest person I've ever met. I mean, he is a post-doc in theoretical physics at Nanjing University. He is literally the stereotypical nerdy Chinese guy, but so incredibly sweet. AKA he forces me to eat fruit all the time. My friend Ting Ting actually helped me find the apartment, and I trust her judgment, but I really didn't know how it would turn out and was a little nervous from hearing horror stories about apartments from other people. But Li Hua is awesome. The best thing is that he is talkative, and loves to chat with me in Chinese while randomly inserting English into the middle of conversations, especially with numbers and colors (ie, 我在南京会住two年). It's hilarious. He finds my habits and me fascinating, like how I don't wear slippers in the house and eat peanut butter and jelly. He's exactly what I wanted in a Chinese flatmate. He also offered to introduce me to his classmates! The first night I arrived I couldn't connect to the Internet, so he literally called 5 of his classmates who tried to help him over the phone until one that owns a Macbook agreed to actually come over at 10 o'clock at night.

The landlord came over yesterday to accompany me to the local police station for foreigner residence registration, and she was discussing the electricity bill with Li Hua: "Be prepared," she said, "Foreigners waste electricity because they always turn on the heater （空调）. Sometimes they'll keep the heater as high as 20 degrees (68 degrees Farenheit) all day and all night. They really fear the cold （外国人非常怕冷)."

I normally would be slightly peeved, except it's really the truth. There's really no better way to put it than to say that I am scared of the cold weather, especially when it involves a house with no central heating, nor insulation for that matter. And when they say "heater" they actually mean an air conditioner that blows hot air in the winter (read: not very efficient). I guess it builds character. I guess one winter in Nanjing wasn't enough to toughen my skin against the cold, so maybe this one will do it.* 

pictures on the next page!!! 

48 hours later...

I stayed up all night on Friday, September 2nd, not even sleeping for a minute, as I was finishing up my graduate school application to University of Hawaii and fellowship application to the adjacent East-West Center research institute. I figured that my tiredness would allow me to sleep on my 12:30 pm flight the next day to Shanghai. My parents and I left the house in Orem, Utah at 5:30 am on Saturday, September 3rd and drove to the Salt Lake City airport, chatting about the week (playing badminton and swimming in the hot springs were the highlights for me) and my aspirations for the future. After saying our goodbyes, I went through security and relaxed at the gate.  

My Dad, my mom and me saying our goodbyes at the ticket counter.

At the drop-off area at 5 am, walking to the ticket counter with all my heavy luggage!

I flew to Las Vegas first and when I arrived at the gate I immediately noticed that 1.) there were slot machines in the airport, and 2.) there were at least 15 Chinese people waiting at the gate. I wondered if they were also flying to LAX to get the same flight as me to Shanghai. So I sat at the gate and surfed the Internet while I waited. The gate attendant then announced that our flight was delayed, but not to worry because all connections were good. A timid Chinese girl approached the desk and explained that she didn't think there would be enough time to transfer at LAX with the hour delay, but the attendant assured her that everything would be fine. Our plane ended up leaving the gate around 1 hour and 15 minutes late, but I remained calm despite worrying that I might lose my luggage with such a short time to transfer. After we landed, the other Chinese people on my flight anxiously got up and immediately started gathering their luggage, despite the flight attendant insisting that they stay in their seats until the seat belt light is turned off. Noticing how rushed the Chinese passengers were, I again wondered if they were also worried about making their 12:30 flight to Shanghai, but their behavior was nothing unusual for a Chinese person anxious about getting in the front of a hurried mob. Then I turned on my cell phone. It was 12:15 already. I mistakenly thought that we would change time zones from Las Vegas to LAX, and didn't realize that there was literally no time to catch a 12:30 flight.