Entries from June 2007 ↓

Well, this week hasn’t been the greatest.

On Wednesday, Pizza left for Thailand. She’ll be gone for 9 months. She’s been tutoring me for quite a while, so I was really sorry to see her go. She set me up with one of her classmates, but it looks like her friend doesn’t actually have any free time outside of evenings and weekends. Sigh.

Yesterday, my other study partner, April, told me she’s starting some classes, so she won’t be free to study with me on Tuesdays and Wednesdays any more … at least for the next few weeks. Argh!

And now my iPod’s broken and there are gigantic, flying roaches (maybe just one… ok, two) in my home.

June 1st was Children’s Day. Jeremy and I celebrated with the kids from April’s English class. She arranged several games for us to play together. Seems a little torturous to make your kids practice English with real, live English-speakers on Children’s Day, but they seemed to have fun. We gave them a stamp on the hand every time they got something right, and then they could get prizes at the end of the day based on the number of stamps they had. It was fun. Her brother-in-law took a few photos:

And here’s a nice photo of our incredibly serious badminton team. In Chinese, it’s Yumaoqiu 羽毛球 — feather ball!

More photos on April’s blog.

Wow! Wild tigers were spotted in Xishuangbanna:

For the first time ever, scientists recently captured clear footage of a wild Indo-Chinese tiger in a nature reserve in China’s southeastern Yunnan Province. The researchers used infrared cameras as part of wildlife monitoring and protection project supported jointly by the Xishuangbanna National Nature Conservation Protected Areas Management in Shangyong, Beijing Normal University Institute of Ecology, and the International Species Protection Project.

Source: World Watch

Hey! I noticed a few days ago that some of my flickr photos weren’t appearing on my website. If you’re in China and you may also be experiencing problems viewing photos from flickr. Install this magic addon to Mozilla Firefox and everything will reappear.

http://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4286

Thanks to John at Sinosplice for pointing me to the fix!

Discussion about the disappearing photos on flickr forum.

(Confused? “What is Firefox?,” you ask. It’s a web browser! If you don’t know what browser you’re using you might be using Internet Explorer — the one with the big blue “e”. Firefox is a safer browser, download it here.)

I talked to my friend April about that poem I memorized. And she had a different take on the last few lines. Of course, I doubt she’s wrong on this one!

谁言寸草心, shui2 yan2 cun4 cao3xin1,
报得三春晖. bao4de2 san1chun1hui1.

word-by-word translation:

who (nobody) / calls / short / grass / heart (feeling)
tells / for / three / spring (the season) / sunlight

Here the small leaves of grass are not a metaphor for the child, but in fact refer back to the clothes the mother is weaving/sewing. Meaning, the clothes are such a small token of her love, that although they will remind him of her love, he will eventually wear them thin. The clothes she sews for him so lovingly cannot last forever. Ah, yes. I like that message a little better.

Today I found even more treasures abandoned by American students, including the March issue of Harper’s Magazine. Woohoo! Also another two coursepacks: “Social Issues/Arts and Humanities Seminar” and “Minority Areas Field Excursion Readings.”

The original source of all of these coursepacks is presumably SIT, a study abroad program for undergraduates. Their course syllabi are online (includes full bibliographies of readings).

I was just thinking about all those things that are bugging me, things I can only (mysteriously) refer to here as “things not appropriate for blogging.” But I realize that lately I’ve been incredibly fortunate. Last night my friend, Jessie, invited me to dinner with her parents and then we went to an “open mic nite” at a bar. Really lovely people. And although it wasn’t exactly Chinese practice (they are Australians) it was so relaxed and normal. I don’t think I need to remind you, but “normal” isn’t always so “normal” around here. Living in a constant state of being “the other” can really wear you out.

Last night I also had the good fortune of finding a collection of books and course packs abandoned by some American students that were studying here. Oddly enough half (!) of the books were ones I’d already read and I passed them on to Jessie and her dad. But I think the course packs are the real gold mine. They are labeled: Orientation Readings (introductory material for their big study abroad semester), History and Religions, and Minority Issues/Field Study Seminar. It’s all in English, of course, and it’s all so… USEFUL. I mean, I haven’t really dug into any of it, but skimming the first two packs, I’m really very interested in spending some time reading through them. Here’s the abbreviated bib included as the table of contents for each pack:

[UPDATE: Full bibliographies available on SIT website (see course syllibi).]
Orientation Readings -
1. Behind the Facade (Manfred Morganstern)
2. Introduction to Your College Semester Abroad (SIT)
3. The Green Banana (Donald Batchelder)
4. Creditable Study Abroad (John Sommer)
5. Traveling as a Vegetarian (Costas Christ)
6. Big Bad China and the Good Chinese (Jeffrey Wasserstrom)
7. The Chinese Character (Lin Yutang)
8. Confucianism and Western Democracy (Hu Shaohua)
9. Encountering the Chinese (Hu Wenhong and Cornelius Grove)

History and Religions Seminar -
1. Approaches to Understanding China’s History (John King Fairbank)
2. Patterns from the Past (John Bryan Starr)
3. Political Development in Reforming China (Tong Yangqi)
4. China’s Political System (John Bryan Starr)
5. China and Its Religious Inheritance (John Chamberlayne)
6. Sino-Muslim Identity in Modern China (Johnathan Lipman)
7. Mad Dogs and Englishmen (Craig Storti)
8. A Traveler’s Guide to the Chinese History (Madge Huntington)

Minority Issues/Field Study Seminar -
1. The Two Chinas (Kevin Sinclair)
2. Representing Nationality in China (Dru Gladney)
3. Sex Tourism Practices in the Periphery (Nancy Chen)
4. Ethnic Identity in China (Dru Gladney)
5. China’s Many Faces (Susan Blum)
6. Against Authenticity (Susan Blum)
7. One Drop of Blood (Lawrence Wright)
8. Interviewing Informants (Julia Crane)
9. Participant Observation (Julia Crane)
10. Collecting Life Histories (Julia Crane)
11. Fieldwork Under Time Constraints (John Hoddinott)
12. Fieldworking in Kunming (Susan Blum)
13. The Return of the Foreign Anthropologies? (Gregory Guldin)
14. Sinicizing Chinese Anthropology (Gregory Guldin)
15. Thinking About the Ethics of Fieldwork (Ken Wilson)

Yeah, I’m still alive. My sister scared the hell out of me yesterday, by calling my cell phone from the U.K. Apparently, there was an enormous earthquake in Pu’er City not far from Kunming (our home), but we didn’t even feel it. The quake killed three people, injured 290, and forces tens of thousands of people from their homes. Sounds awful.

I memorized a poem for class today. It’s called 游子吟 (You2zi3 Yin2) or “A Song for a Traveler”. It is often recited on Mother’s Day because it’s about a mother’s love for her child. Her child is about to leave home, and she is sewing his clothes.

慈母手中线, ci2mu3 shou3zhong1 xian4,
游子身上衣, you2zi3 shen1shang4 yi1.
临行密密缝, lin2xing2 mi4mi4 feng2,
意恐迟迟归. yi4 kong3 chi2chi2 gui1.
谁言寸草心, shui2 yan2 cun4 cao3xin1,
报得三春晖. bao4de2 san1chun1hui1.

Here’s my rough translation:

A loving mother with thread in her hand,
A traveler with clothes on his body.
Before he leaves she so, so carefully sews,
Fearing it will be a long, long time before he returns.
No one claims the new blades of grass feel
Any gratitude for three months of spring sun.

From what I can gather is it’s about us, your damn, ungrateful children, who don’t appreciate the sacrifices you make and abandon you without so much as a “thank you”. But I might have this wrong. [UPDATE: Yes, I was wrong.] Here are some other translations:

Song of the Wanderer

The thread moves in the hand of the mother kind,
To weave a garment for the wanderer to wear.
As the mother plies the needle with much care,
Anxiety for her son’s tarry out so troubles her mind.
Oh, can the tender plant have enough to pay,
For the sunshine of so many a spring day?
Source: Learn Chinese Mandarin London

A thread is in my fond mother’s hand moving.
For her son to wear the clothes ere leaving.
With her whole heart she’s sewing and sewing.
For fear I’ll e’er be roving and roving.
Who says the little soul of grass waving.
Could for the warmth repay the sun of spring.

The thread in the hands of a fond-hearted mother
Makes clothes for the body of her wayward boy;
Carefully she sews and thoroughly she mends,
Dreading the delays that will keep him late from home.
But how much love has the inch-long grass
For three spring months of the light of the sun?

These two are both from: bbs.netat.net

The poet is Meng Jiao (751 – 814), who lived during the Tang Dynasty (618 – 907).