September 20, 2000
Dear All,
Life at Sichuan University is falling into a pleasant routine. I thought you might be interested in how I spend my time.
Many days I can wake up as the spirit moves me. Pretty nice, since the spirit comes around 7:30 or even 8:00 some mornings. I’ve asked Pam [Buick, administrative assistant to the president] to accommodate my newly discovered schedule preferences once I return to the Springs. :-)
I eat breakfast in my apartment although there is a cafeteria in my building. I love Chinese food but I’m not a big fan of Chinese breakfast, which usually consists of rice porridge (something like runny oatmeal) with pickled vegetables or little pieces of meat to stir in for flavoring. The accommodation to westerners is often fried eggs, really fried hard, and bread instead of steamed or fried buns. Actually, when eaten with jam, the Chinese buns are pretty good but I don’t think they have much food value. In my kitchen I make breakfast with fresh fruit, orange juice, crackers or simple cookies or rather strange muffin-like things from the market (or one of my jealously hoarded Clif Bars from the “fear of barley and yak meat” time in Tibet), and hot tea. There is a big 20-gallon water boiler on each floor to provide hot water for tea for the residents. Each room has a big thermos as part of the standard equipment so I walk down to the service room, fill the thermos, and make tea with loose tea leaves, not tea bags.
In a semi-tropical climate, baths and showers are quite welcome. I often take two a day. For the first week or so I was mystified by the irregular presence of hot water. About day four I was ready to look up the Chinese words in order to complain but then, voila! really hot water. You can’t go whining to the floor attendant when the faucet produces the desired commodity. After some scientific observation, I have come to the conclusion that the presence of hot water is in direct proportion to the number of people in the building who have tried to get hot water before me. On the days that I begin teaching at 8 am, I am probably one of the first so I have to run the water 10-15 minutes to get the hot water to the third floor. I can get up, eat breakfast (including the trip down the hall with my thermos) and still be waiting for hot bath water some mornings.
So now I’m clean-or at least cleanish. A limp stream of water from a hand-held shower doesn’t have the same psychological effect as a blast from an American nozzle but that’s part of the experience of being in a foreign setting. Before I left home I read several advice books for foreign teachers in China. One said, “If you are lucky enough to get hot water, drop whatever you are doing and immediately jump in the tub with all the dirty laundry that needs doing. Clean yourself and your clothes at the same time.” My situation is certainly better than that!
As I have mentioned, I teach the graduate students in the English Department so on Tuesday mornings I’m up and out early for 8:00 class. The College of Foreign Languages building is about a 10 minute walk from the Foreign Experts Building so it’s an easy commute. I’ll tell you more about my course later.
On my non-teaching days, I use the freshness of the mornings to do good deeds. Sometimes I study my Chinese lessons, sometimes compose letters or teaching materials on my laptop. I often have cool air (albeit badly polluted) coming in the window near my desk so it’s quite pleasant. My first week or two I used most of my uncommitted time to do basic necessities. The supermarket was a daily destination -- a Chinese version of Target upstairs and a grocery mart downstairs, with the uncharacteristic quality of all fixed pricing rather than bargaining. I bought everything from towels to computer paper to groceries to ziplock bags (a necessity to protect against humidity and insects).
One of my early compulsions was finding a good place to do email. The internet café is a popular feature everywhere, it seems, but nowhere more so than an academic environment. The Chuanda computer system is universally condemned as so slow as to be worthless so I began looking for other options. In the meantime I did comparison shopping in the local wangba (internet café) scene. One had a nicer ambience but connections that couldn’t be much better than the much maligned university system. Another was faster but a long walk away. A third had lots of smokers. Another had disk drives, so I could compose messages at home, take my diskette to the wangba, and then do cut and paste while connected and paying money to the wangba entrepreneur. Then I also had to figure out the hours when there would be a seat available, since Chuanda students don’t have personal computers, but use the wangba instead.
And even at good times the connections are unpredictable. I was told that there are three international portals for internet in all of China-Beijing, Shanghai, and Guanzhou. So every transaction in and out of the country must go through one of those portals. The problem is obvious. Thus a session at the wangba can easily consume two hours or more, to log on, read email, reply, compose messages, and so on. I now have a wangba that allows me to take my laptop and connect directly!
Most days I eat lunch at the cafeteria. Although I have a kitchen, it’s a lot easier to have someone else cook for me. (I have never sympathized with the CC students who are eager to have apartments and cook their own meals. After decades of cooking, I like the luxury of someone else doing the work.) A typical lunch would be an entree, a bowl of rice with unlimited refills, and something to drink, usually bottled water. At dinner I often splurge on a bottle of beer. Total cost: about a dollar, maybe $1.50 if I order something expensive. And if several people eat together, which we usually do, we put all the dishes in the middle of the table and have quite a nice selection. I’m quite curious, though, since there is an English menu of four pages and a Chinese menu of about twice that. What are Chinese people able to order that we foreigners are not? Is it something I’d rather not get too close to, like duck’s feet? (A bit gelatinous for my taste) Or sea slugs -- the plain vanilla name for sea cucumbers? (About the only item on a Chinese menu I really don’t like.) Mealtime is an adventure in translation, which results in dishes arriving that bear little or no resemblance to the mental image conjured up by the words on the English menu.
I try to show up at the College of Foreign Languages most days. Offices are shared, and the dean graciously offered to let me use the other half of his office with me since his officemate is at the University of New Mexico right now. It’s great to have a place to store my stuff and to meet with students. I’ve discovered that the big time to catch people is mid-morning at the break between the end of the 8am classes and the start of the 10 a.m. classes. The faculty lounge has copies of China Daily, the official English language newspaper, which isn’t an objective source of information about the only thing in English I can access regularly. (The New York Times website is too massive to deal with from China, and often blocked by the government, it seems.) There are only two hotels in town that I have found selling the International Herald Tribune, so I am pretty much out of the loop on the news. It’s nice not knowing the daily fluctuations of the presidential campaign!
Afternoons have some of the same characteristics as mornings -- no set schedule most days but lots of things that need doing. Some evenings I spent by myself, reading or writing, but I have had an amazing number of social invitations. Zhu Tongbo, the American Studies professor here whom I met in 1995, has taken major responsibility for me. He negotiated my official appointment as a visiting scholar, he arranged for my seminar (they call it a lecture series but I am making the students participate), and he is introducing me to people at the university and in the community. Some are former students so he can ask them to do things for me -- the relationship between teacher and student is not the lifelong bond that I saw in Japan between sensei and student, but pretty close. There is a moral obligation, even years after graduation, to fulfill the teacher’s requests. Professor Zhu (you never call Chinese people by their first names unless you are very close or they are very westernized) is leaving this week for a semester-long fellowship in Edinburgh, sponsored by the British Academy, so he has tried to use his guanxi (connections) on my behalf before his departure. And, since meeting people always seems to include food, I have been invited to some very nice restaurants for dinner in the last few weeks.
Dinner otherwise is at the cafeteria or in small open-air restaurants on the streets. I have learned enough food words that I can ask for simple dishes. (It’s amazing how quickly one’s vocabulary increases when the necessity arises!) I haven’t used the “just point” system yet, in which you tell the waitress that you want whatever the people at the next table are eating. You never know how much Sichuan pepper it might contain. One of my well-honed phrases is “Bu tai mala” or “Not too much spice.”
When I’m not invited out, evenings are usually quiet. Even the students in the dorm are pretty good about late night behavior so I am rarely bothered. Most nights I get lots of sleep. I‘m trying to decide if my natural bio-rhythms call for 8 or 9 hours a night, or if I am slowing chipping away at years of sleep deprivation. Either way, it’s luxurious.
Now that I am over the hump of arranging for food, clothing and shelter, I’m devoting less time to the basics each day. But less doesn’t mean none. One of the interesting observations I’ve made is that routine business takes a lot longer here than it does in the United States. It isn’t because of the bureaucracy, necessarily, but just the situation. Therefore I am happy when I can accomplish one major task each day. Let me give a couple of examples.
I decided that it would be a good idea to get a library card. I asked my contact person at the College of Foreign Languages, who told me that I needed to talk with the Foreign Affairs office (the waiban) of the university. Fine. My handler arranged for an English-speaking student to accompany me since the waiban needed to check my passport and visa anyway to be sure I’m legal, and also to register me with the police. The waiban is on the other side of the campus, about a 20 minute walk away, so a few days later when I had a block of unscheduled time I walked over to the main administration building with the student.
Mr. Guan told me, fine, we can get you a library card, you will need to provide four passport-type pictures. So the student and I went out in search of a photo place. We found one near the post office on campus and the guy quickly whipped out a chair, a background, and his camera and snapped away. “Five yuan” I was told (less than a dollar). Come back in two days and the pictures will be ready. Well, three days later I returned, figuring an extra day for whatever, but the photo guy wasn’t there. Four days, still didn’t find the guy. About day six I started to ask around in my best but limited Chinese. One person pointed me over to a nearby stall where people drop off rolls of film and pick up snapshots, but that certainly wasn’t it. The attendant pointed back to the original place. The next day there was someone sitting by the little doorway where the photo guy had been. I said, “Last week I had my picture taken….” And the fellow replied in words and pantomime, “I need your receipt.” Of course the fellow who took my picture didn’t give me anything. I walked past the place once or twice more before I decided it was a hopeless situation.
So I started over again, this time looking for a shop that would do Polaroid pictures so I wouldn’t get in the same loop once again. I thought I would try an establishment close to the waiban to save time. I want into one fairly professional looking place with a Fujifilm sign up above and asked the guy in my best Chinese if he could do the pictures right now, I didn’t want to wait. “Sure” he said, and whipped out a chair, a background, some nice light fixtures, and his camera, and snapped away. I got a receipt without having to ask and was told to come back the next day. So much for my Polaroid dreams.
The next day I trudged my 20 minutes, this time in the rain, picked up the pictures and went to the waiban. Doors closed. No sign, not that I could read a notice in Chinese anyway. About two days later I tried again with better luck. Mr. Guan accepted my four pictures and told me to come back the next Tuesday to pick up the library card. Finally, yesterday at a meeting for foreign faculty, I got my library card. “Oh, you must pay ten yuan.” I may never take out a book, although I think I should just on principle. Mostly I wanted to have an official document in Chinese, both to waive at officials and to keep as a souvenir.
My other example is more mundane-laundry. I brought a wardrobe of drip-dry stuff, partly because it’s hot and sticky so I go through clothes in a hurry, and partly because I knew I wouldn’t find fancy laundry facilities. In fact, my handler is very proud of the fact that my apartment has a washing machine, while the students and visitors must use communal ones on each floor.
My washing machine is automatic but not in the American sense. I think of it as a manual automatic washer. Let me describe the process. The machine has two bins. The left hand one is the washer-agitator. You fill it with water and clothes, turn on the dial, and it agitates the clothes for the time period you indicate. There is a faucet just above the washing machine which you turn on and off to fill the tub with the amount of water you need. Of course, the faucet is only attached to the cold water line but a friend came up with a good suggestion. Use a wash basin or the hot water thermos in the room to fill the tub with hot water rather than cold. So I go to the bathtub or to the kitchen sink, or down to the service room, whatever is producing hot water at the time, and fill the tub manually.
So the clothes, detergent, and hot or hottish water agitate for about 10 minutes. Then I turn another dial to drain the water from the tub. I have to be careful since the plastic outflow tube has a tendency to pop out of the drain in the floor -- then I get dirty soapy water all over the kitchen. Once the water is drained, I close the tub, fill again with clean water, set the agitator dial and try to get the soap out of the clothes. Usually that takes several repetitions of the process. Once the clothes are rinsed, I move them to the right hand tub which is the spinner. In 3-5 minutes most of the water is extracted from the clothing and the result is a damp rather than wet pile of shirts, pants, and underwear.
In the stairwell near my room, on an outdoor but covered balcony, there are several wash lines strung for drying laundry. So I put the clean clothes on hangars and let my stuff dry. When the weather is not too humid, things dry in about a half a day. The other option is to hang the clothes in the bathroom, but then it’s hard to find the plumbing through the wet wardrobe. In the winter, however, the bathroom may be the only choice since I’ve been told that outdoor drying is almost impossible in the cold humidity that is typical in winter in Chengdu.
When I say that I am happy to accomplish one good task each day, in addition to the basics, this story demonstrates why. I’m not complaining at all (sure beats doing all the laundry in the sink or beating it on rocks by the stream) but just explaining why I find that my days often pass quickly without a lot to show. When people talk about getting back to the basics they usually have other things in mind, but I will always think of doing laundry.
What else do I do with my time? I’ve been extremely fortunate to have a wonderful mentor in Zhu Tongbo, the professor of English and American Studies whom I first met on my 1995 visit to Sichuan University with a delegation of college and university presidents. He spent a year at Colorado College as a Fulbright scholar, so my semester here is something of a mirror image of his experience in the US. Through him I have met a number of people at the university and in the community who would never have crossed my path otherwise. And since Zhu and his wife are leaving this week for a semester in Edinburgh, courtesy of the British Academy, he has made a point to have me well set up while he is away. I’m delighted for him, of course, that he has this wonderful opportunity, but selfishly I would enjoy having him around for my entire sabbatical. He’s a charming man and a wonderful resource.
One of the introductions he made for me was to Luo Zhihui, a well-known traditional Chinese artist about 45 years old. (Incidentally, for those of you who don’t know, the family name comes first in Chinese names and the given name second. Family more important than the individual. The tradition is a two-syllable given name to go with the universally one-syllable family name, but now most parents give one-syllable names to their children. Yikes! Much harder for foreigners to figure out which name is which.)
Anyway, Miss Luo agreed to give me private lessons twice a week, an extremely generous gift. I go to her studio in her home on the other side of the city, perhaps 15 or 20 minutes by taxi in non-rush hour. One of Professor Zhu’s students, Lily, accompanies me because Miss Luo speaks about as much English as I speak Chinese. Our language capabilities are OK for the fundamentals but insufficient for a discussion of aesthetic subtleties. She is teaching me traditional flower painting. The method is watch and copy. “You must learn the structure of each kind of flower before you can paint freely with your own expression. You must observe carefully.” She does a detailed realistic outline of the petals and leaves in ink. Then the next step is filling it in with color, layer by layer, quite painstakingly, almost like an adult coloring book. My latest lesson was introduction to color. It’s absolutely fascinating to watch a two-dimensional line drawing become a three-dimensional portrait of a flower as Miss Luo adds color.
It’s always dangerous to make assumptions about what people are thinking, but here is what I imagine was going through Miss Luo’s head at the first lesson. “Oh my god, I agreed to take this student because I was asked by a friend. I’d rather be doing my own painting than fiddling around with her. She says she has done some Chinese painting before but you know that these foreigners can’t understand Chinese ways. How long is she staying? What am I in for?” From past experience, I have learned enough about Chinese customs to know that, perhaps only second to food, one gives gifts. So at the beginning of the first lesson I presented her with my gift. On the hopes that I would have a painting teacher, I brought along from the U.S. a beautiful (heavy!) coffee table book of American art, with almost 600 color illustrations from different periods and different styles. Miss Luo was thrilled! Books like this are unavailable in China. So I made a big hit on the first day.
Then after about an hour of lecture/demonstration, she put a line drawing of a hibiscus flower in front of me and said (through Lily), “I want to see how you hold the brush and how you paint. Please copy this flower. Don’t be nervous. Take your time.” So carefully, slowly, I did my best. I think Miss Luo was quite relieved. First, I do know how to hold a Chinese paint brush, which is a different technique than western style. Secondly, while my attempt was not as good as the original, you could tell at least that the flower was the same species. Chinese people are incredibly polite, so her “very good” was required by the circumstances. But I thought I also heard a sense of relief that I was more competent than she had expected. And then when I showed up at my next class having done the flower four more times, she could see that I am also diligent. That counts for a lot in Chinese culture.
Thus my three-part plan for my sabbatical is falling into place. I am teaching American studies, I am taking painting lessons, and I have also arranged for a language tutor to work with me twice a week on my Chinese. My students all want to speak English with me, naturally, and I have an obligation to give them listening practice from a native speaker, so I need to work on my Chinese elsewhere. And since my teacher in Colorado Springs warned me not to come home with a Sichuan accent, I can’t just use my interactions in the market as my language practice!
Well, this is much more than you expected to learn about my daily life. Next time I will tell you about my further investigations into “red kerchief” phenomenon and other adventures.
Cheers,
Kathryn