It's Sunny in China!

Hey friends,

 

It’s been a while. I am now officially out of seclusion and can resume contact with the world now. The proficiency exam is over, and for the most part, I have finished my junior year. But before I go on and talk about the, let me talk about the past for a little bit.

 

In the months leading up to the proficiency exam. I didn’t really do much other than study things that I would hope would show up on the exam. Though, the week before my boy friend did take me on a very relaxing vacation to go explore the city of Dalian.

 

Dalian is a small city of only 6 million or so people located on the Chinese peninsula bordering North Korea. Unfortunately, during our visit we weren’t able to make the 4 hour bus to the city on the border of North Korea. Instead, we spent our time strolling along the Dalian boardwalk and riding rollercoasters at this ridiculous rip-off of Disneyland. It was this giant park called “Discovering Wang Land,” and despite my original skepticism of the safety of Chinese roller coasters, Rocky convinced me to go for a few rides. Rocky really likes roller coasters, and being able to fly through clean (relatively unpolluted air) was something that he was really excited to do. I, on the other hand, clenched the handlebars and screamed for dear life as I was shot and spun around on these crazy new fangled magnetic slingshot roller coasters that left me dizzy for hours afterwards.

 

I really enjoyed the boardwalk. It wasn’t nearly as crowded as Beijing, and there were many little stands selling various seafood snacks. Everything was so fresh. As we walked along the beach we even saw people combing the rocks for oysters that had recently made their way to the beach. Most of them were older women wielding a hammer in one hand and a plastic bag in the other, wobbling along the coast rocks putting the larger oysters into their bag and popping the smaller ones into their mouths as they gathered.

 

I think even had more fun renting a tandem and cheesily riding up the BinHai road that follows the costal mountains of Dalian. Most of the locals thought we were crazy for even trying, and riding a bulky heavy tandem uphill is a lot more challenging than I imagined it would be.

 

At any rate, after a weekend of riding roller coasters and eating seafood, I returned to Beijing to study some more, and the week after I took the exam.

 

The exam went alright. Heh. I wish I could have passed with flying colors, but due to the prevalence of some northern Chinese idiomatic expressions, an unfamiliar scantron format, and a few hundred characters I did not recognize, I think I got a 6/8 on the exam. This is the basic score for going to a graduate school in a Chinese college. But, if I’m lucky, and most of the other students thought the exam was harder than expected, then maybe the curve will bump me up to a 7 or an 8. But even if my score isn’t that good this time, I can take the exam again in June/October/November. So there are plenty of chances for me to do well.

 

Though, not that this exam is over. I am more or less finished with my Junior year. With an exception of taking a final and writing a paper for my internship, I am done.

 

In the next couple weeks, my parents will visit and Rocky and I will take a vacation to Kashgar for the Labor Week holiday.

 

I’m really really really excited to go to Kashgar. Really really. Really. It’s a really culturally diverse part of China in the Xinjiang Autonomous region. Xinjiang literally means, “the frontier,” and has been the center of Han Chinese, Middle Eastern, and European exchange for more than 1000 years. It’s the last surviving city on the Ancient Silk Road in China! The culture is a pluralistic mix of Turkic peoples, Pakistani people, Kyrgyz peoples, and the blue-eyed, blonde haired Chinese descended from Romans captured by the Mongol empire.

 

And! Have have delicious food! I’ve been to a few Xinjiang restaurants in Beijing, and am itching for some whole roasted lamb, organic grapes, and spicy spicy meat on a stick.

 

Then, after enjoying a few weeks of break, I start class again on June 25^th— getting back into the rhythm of having an actual classroom rather than 1 on 1 tutoring and interning 3 days a week. I’ll by studying full time from June 25-Aug 17, coming back to the US to see my family and see you all on the retreat, and then going back to China from Sept 15-Dec 9 for another term of study. Hopefully these next few terms will be able to push me one level higher in my Chinese.

 

On the side, I’ll be doing some part time work with the Peking University Women’s Legal Center. I’ll be acting as a consultant and translator, helping them with their English publications. I haven’t started with them yet, but I’ll be sure to let you all know once I do.

 

Anyway, I hope you’re all doing well. Have a great spring quarter!

The New Year!

Hello friends. Sorry I haven’t posted in a while, China got really busy after winter break ended. It was a fairly abrupt change to my everyday pace of waking up at noon and wandering aimlessly my apartment until something forces me to enter the outside world. It was cold, luckily, its warming up in China. Weather is slowly enter the 50s again, and despite northern China having the worst drought in more than 50 years and the most luxurious hotel under construction burning down two days ago, things are doing fine.

I spent most of the break either studying or lounging around, and topped it off with the celebration of the Spring Festival. This is the largest celebratory period in the Chinese calendar, and quite possibly the occasion triggering the largest period of human short term migration. Every year, millions of people return to their hometowns to celebrate the Spring Festival with their families. People go home to celebrate the “passing of the Year” and engage in about 2 weeks of eating, drinking, driving away ghosts, and seeing family. I spent the eve of the spring festival with a Chinese friend of mine whose parents came to visit Beijing.

During this period of time, you’re supposed to welcome the New Year by eating auspicious foods (long noodles for a long life, fish to bring financial prosperity, and well, I guess I also accidentally had my first taste of donkey, though, I’m not sure when and in what dish I had it, so I guess it wasn’t as climactic a “new food” experience as I hoped it would be). It’s also celebrated with Bai Jiu (Chinese “White Wine” or “Chinese Vodka”), which is about 50% alcohol, has a weird spicy taste, and had me thoroughly intoxicated within minutes. Now, I really only had one shot, but as you probably know, friends, that’s really all it takes. Then, come midnight, the fireworks began.

For the next two weeks, until the Lantern festival, every night was, in varying degrees, filled with fireworks, firecrackers, loud boom noise things that shoot up into the sky and set off car alarms for blocks, ground flowers, and roman candles. This country takes its fireworks seriously. Well, I’m not sure seriously is the right word for it, because I thought the city was going to burn down during the whole spring festival. The fireworks in the video, everything that you saw was produced by somebody who went to a fruit stand, threw down a couple hundred RMB, and then proceeded to “drive out” every ghost in China come nightfall. It was a bit terrifying sometimes to see people setting off fireworks so close to my apartment building, so close that some of them would burst right in front of my window. I got used to it after a while, and used to the barrage of firecrackers that seemed to go off everyday at sunrise.

It was fun while it lasted. Though, once the semester started, I barely had enough time to make dinner for myself. I'm currently working Monday, Wednesday, Friday, from 9:00am-6:00pm at CNN Beijing, and it's been a really amazing experience so far. This is the sort of Chinese speaking work environment experience I was hoping on having. I spent my days reading Chinese newspapers and researching through Chinese internet to find whatever the reporters are looking for. I think my favorite thing to do so far is translating/transcribing the interview tapes that they bring back into the office from Chinese into English. It has pushed my vocabulary to the limits, and has definitely given me an interesting taste of Chinese culture. At the same time, it's given me a new view of the media industry, a view which is forming and I will probably try to put it into words after I get back into the United States. But yes, China is definitely a place that is seeing growth and social innovations that suprise me as an American. For instance, people get addicted to the internet cafe's here. And I suppose I can't even call them internet cafe's because the Chinese don't even call them that. They call them "internet bars," and they are these dark, badly ventilated, greasy, rooms filled with computers that people can rent for a fairly low fee. Apparently, there have been several elementary and middle school students that have been skipping school to go hang out at the internet bars, so much to the point that it's created a group of truant students who are having difficulties coping with the real world in doing things like...finding jobs.

I suppose it might be somewhat equitable to people who game too much in the US, but it's just so fascinating to think that these internet bars are creating a new group of people that actually physically know eachother, as opposed to video games which can socially isolate people in the US.

Anyway, yeah, I work at CNN 3 days a week, and then tuesday/thursday, I have class from 9:00am-4:30pm, and Saturday I have class from 9:00am-noon. Each week is something that i really need to put my mind to, get goodnights rests for, and prepare for, lest I end up crashing. I really only need to keep up this lifestyle through April 18-19, the days in which I will submit myself to the Chinese proficiency exam. So I apologize now for my slowdown in correspondences.

Outside of work, life is good-- have a boyfriend now. He's nice. His name is rocky. He works as a school nurse in Beijing. He's from Seattle. Funny how things work out. 

Anyway, Happy Year of the Ox!

zaijian!

George

hello hello

Hello America!

I pray that the worst of the bad weather is behind all of you now. Things are slowly getting nicer here in Beijing as we get closer to the Spring Festival. Beijing is getting quieter now. Many of the foreign students have gone home for winter break, and most of the Chinese students have returned to their home provinces. This Bridge Cafe is fairly empty. 

It's been a couple weeks since I've come back to the Cafe. Anything colder than Seattle really demotivates me from doing anything. I have been keeping  myself busy though. I've spent much of my time studying ahead so I can lighten up my load next quarter, and well, watching more movies in a period of time than I have in the last three years. This is mostly due to the fact that my roommate likes to make regular trips to the "DVD store" to purchase some of the latest releases, including: Milk, the Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Che, and Grand Torino.

Things on the whole have just been really slow. I'm not complaining. I really enjoy this mellow break. It's given me a lot of time to reflect on the state of...everything.

I will admit that I was sort of languidly floating about my apartment for the first part of winter break, but things have gotten better. I guess it helps that I got a letter from a friend that really cheered me up. I hadn't talked to him for a couple months, and I thought that the our distance had given him reason enough to stop talking to me, but he sent me a message, saying cute things and bringing back fond memories. I gained back some my energy, and that day I moped the floors, washed the dishes, washed the windows, cleaned both bathrooms, did the laundry, dusted, and made dinner.

It's silly what a few words can do, especially when they are from the right person. 

In other news:

I was told my real Chinese name last week. Now, since I can remember, I thought my name was "吴小明 － Wu Xiao Ming - Little Bright One (of the Wu family)." The name itself isn't that special. In Chinese, it actually has a air commonness. It's a nickname that children are given. It's the name that characters in children's books have. 

After my birth mother passed away, this was the only name that my family members knew to call me. My maternal aunt had heard me called 小明 once, and when I enrolled in Chinese school when I was 7, my Aunt told the school that that was my name.  I always thought that was my name because my grandfather's name was ”吴明国 - Wu Ming Guo - the Radiant Land," and I thought my mother wanted me to be his namesake. I suppose I didn't really have any reason behind this other than that we both had 明 in our names. 

A couple days ago, I had the chance to talk to my nanny from when I was very young. When I was living with my birth mother, my nanny took care of me when my mother had to work.  I saw my nanny only a couple times a year after my mother passed away. I usually went to her house to celebrate the Spring Festival, and drop off a box of Sees candy during Christmas. When my nanny found out that I came to China, she sent me a message saying that she wanted to talk to me, and in the middle of one of our conversations she said "So, what do they call you in China?" I told her ，“小明.” "Why do they call you that," she said, "that's not your name." I was a confused. I mean, I had been going by 小明, for the last 14 years or so. I told her that my aunt had told me my name was 小明 because that was the name my mother called me (aside from using my English name here and there). My nanny then told me that my Aunt never knew my real name. When I was younger, my mom didnt really correspond with my aunt that often. My aunt was busy raising her own son, and when my mother and I would go visit my aunt, she would only playfully call me my nickname， 小明。

My nanny then told me that my mother had decided my real name at my nanny's house, because my nanny was one of the few supports in my mother's life at the time。 It was with her that my mother named me 吴天成，after two chinese phrases, 上天促成, meaning "Made by God" or "Bestowed by Heaven."

At the time, I was so lost as to why she never told me my real name before. She told me that when I was little, she and my mother both called me 天成. During that time, I was a single child in a single-parent household. When my mother passed and my father took responsibility of me, he called me George, my legal english name. She didn't want to contradict my father, and went along with calling me George. I'm still confused about how it would have contradicted anything, and well, it's strange to think that I was once known by a different name. 

I'm not really sure what to do about it now. People have gotten used to calling me 小明, and I've gotten used to people calling me it, but at the same time, this name that I just discovered is this relic from the past that I have this strange sense of duty to preserve. After all, my promise to my mother to keep learning Chinese is one of the big reasons I am in China right now, and it was she who gave me this name.

I suppose I'll figure the rest of this out as the year progresses. But for now, I should get back to studying. I miss you all, be well.

George