Miscellaneous, Part 2

I will start this post by talking about the earthquake, which as you can imagine, has been a major topic lately. We did not feel the quake in Taian and life goes on as normal here. The students collected donations from each other to send to the victims and those helping them and for days there was a town-wide three-minute prayer said at 2:28 in the afternoon for the people killed, injured, or otherwise harmed by the event. It is indeed a tragedy that will take a long time to heal from but among all the images of death and waste, you can also see images of people helping and giving. It is often in these times of disaster when the human spirit can find its greatest strength. There are moments when I despair the seeming lack of goodness in people but during these times of hardship, the compassion that is demonstrated renews my hope.

I am beginning to feel fairly well-adjusted here as I have become more comfortable with my surroundings and have fallen into a routine. I am not picking up the language as quickly as I would like and am finding that often even when I know I am using the correct words, people don’t understand me. I think this has to do with my pronunciation. My theory is that, while in America, we are used to hearing different accents and can understand them, the lack of foreigners here means that the Chinese people are not used to hearing non-native speakers. They do tell me, however, that people speak with different accents in different parts of China. I explained that it is the same in America and proceeded to give them some of my best accent impressions, which they found very amusing.

I often find occasions to laugh during my lessons. Sometimes I am laughing at myself trying to explain things when I don’t have my dictionary handy like the time I was trying to communicate an attitude and how it might be expressed. I did an ultra-exaggerated urban oh-no-he-didn’t while snapping my fingers in the Z formation. It was even funnier to see them copy me. Other times I am laughing at the students because they do really odd things. One day I watched as a boy leaned back in his chair, balance a book on his face, and just sit there. I have no idea what he was doing but I know he wasn’t doing it for attention because he became really embarrassed when he realized I was watching. Another day, I saw a boy in the back of the classroom waving something smoking in the air. It took me a while, but I finally pieced together that he was burning some incense because his feet stank. I suggested he keep his shoes on.














This picture is of a piece of candy one of the students gave to me. I tried explaining to them what “candy corn” is to Americans so they would understand why I found the candy so amusing but I don’t think they understood. I did eat it to see what it would taste like and I think it would be better as a Bertie Bott’s bean than a hard candy.

I was caught a little off guard one day when I was walking down the street and saw a mother in the squat position holding her baby (looked to be about a year old) in a sitting position while he pooped on the sidewalk. His pants were not pulled down; rather they had the crotch seam split. Since then, I have noticed that this is a general trend—you can catch glimpses of little baby bottoms since they all have the seam split out of their pants and wear nothing underneath. I have seen diapers in the supermarket, so I know they are an option, but I guess it is just much easier to let them do their business on the sidewalk. If you come to China, watch where you step.