long johns, citrus fruits, and other random things

Putting on my long johns in November was acceptable. December was logical. January was appropriate. February was expected. Putting on two pairs at once in March was a little less than thrilling, but I could deal. But come on now, putting on long johns in the second half of April?! This is truly getting ridiculous…

 

The Chinese concept of “late” and “early” is a bit different than most of us Westerners. True enough, at least a few of the Chinese authorities understand that to a small extent. We in the foreign student building don’t have a 10:30 curfew like the Chinese dorms. Ours is 11:00.

 

What really surprised me, though, was the day I was walking away from campus at 6:45 p.m. I happened to run into a Chinese girl I know, who also lives at my school, and so we smiled and greeted each other. But to my surprise, she then – very animatedly – told me, “Be careful! What are you doing going out so late?!” Really? 6:45 is late? Wow. If those Chinese students only knew how active the foreign student building is at night…

 

One of the more entertaining moments in my Chinese class recently was when we were talking about the possibility of repeated names. In the U.S., repeated first names are quite common, but to meet someone with the exact same name, first, middle, and last, is not so common. In China, however, there are a lot more people and a lot fewer names, which leads to a lot more people with identical names. Here was the sentence from our text (in translated form, of course): “Even if you name your child ‘Big Cow,’ you’re still bound to run into people with the same name.” Wow, that’s really unfortunate! 

 

Growing up I always thought there were four kinds of citrus fruits: oranges, lemons, limes, and grapefruits. Turns out there are whole lot more than that. (Of course, I know about tangerines, clementines, pomelos, and the like. But there are a lot more than that, too!) My newest discovery of a citrus fruit involved a little orange thing that looks almost identical to a grape tomato (except orange, not red). I had seen a lot of Chinese people buy bags of these little guys, so I thought I should try my hand at it as well. Next stop at the fruit stand, and I bought myself some little orange grape tomato things.

 

Having never seen anyone actually eat one of these before (only seeing people carry them home to eat there), I got home myself and just assumed I could figure out what to do. I mean really, it’s a citrus fruit. How hard can it be? So I washed a couple, grabbed my garbage can, and started peeling. Uh-oh. Why won’t the peel come off? I very awkwardly peeled off this peel that was hardly different than the fruit itself, and then popped what I considered must be the fruit into my mouth.

 

Turned out to be mostly seeds. Yikes. The flavour was good, but it was the messiest little citrus fruit I’ve ever tried eating. And the inside had so many seeds, there was hardly any fruit to eat! (Think about it, the size of a grape tomato, with about 6~8 seeds the size of regular orange seeds. That doesn’t leave much room.) A little disappointed, I went ahead to try another one… maybe the first was just a fluke.

 

Nope. Just as messy and just as little fruit. Darn it.

 

That happened to be right before I was having a bunch of people over for lunch, so I decided to put them out and see if anyone else knew how to eat them. Given how many Chinese I’ve seen buying whole bunches of this little fruit, I figured I must be doing something inefficiently. There must be a better way to eat this fruit.

 

Well, none of the foreigners who came that day had any idea either. So those little fruits sat on my table for a few days, got moldy, and I threw them away disappointedly. Oh well. You win some, you lose some.

 

A couple weeks later, I invited a Chinese girl to come to my room for something. In good Chinese fashion, she brought me a gift… You guessed it, these little orange grape tomato fruits.  Unfortunately, she didn’t stay long enough for me to offer her some and then study how she ate them! Alas, my only potential teacher left and I was there alone with these fruits who had already conquered me once.

 

But fear not! My trusty American friend came over the next day. To my great surprise, of all the people in Shenyang (including those 8 million Chinese ones), the only person who could actually teach me to each these little guys was an American! She walked into my room, saw the fruits on my table, and was excited because she likes them. I admitted the whole story to her, and she laughed hysterically. I decided to laugh too, because I figured it was better for her to laugh with me than at me. But finally, she admitted of her own adventures in learning to eat this fruit, and she gave me a good orange grape tomato fruit eating lesson.

 

In case any of you ever have opportunity to try one of these strange little orange grape tomato fruits, let me give you a brief lesson. I wouldn’t want you to be conquered by them the way I was. It’s pretty humiliating for a fruit to outsmart you. So here’s what you do: Grab one of those little guys, and wash it nice and good. (Don’t you love my English abilities these days?) Then just bite it! Peel and all, just eat it! (Spit out the seeds, of course.)

 

I had no idea there were citrus fruits that are just eaten with the entire peel, but apparently there are. And they’ll get you if you don’t know that.

 

I also had no idea those little guys were worth so much space on my blog…

Exciting Tombs

“Happy Easter!” I say to the deskie in my dorm. (Of course, I didn’t really say “happy Easter,” but rather the Chinese equivalent.) “Happy what?” And the conversation continued, just as it had with every other Chinese person I had talked to that day. “Easter.” “Oh, we don’t have that holiday.”

 

It was a neat opportunity to share with a variety of Chinese what this random holiday that they know Americans celebrate is actually all about. One day, I certainly hope they stop saying that they don’t have that holiday. I hope they realize it’s the most important holiday of them all, and it’s for them, too.

 

But the Chinese have a different holiday (completely unrelated in the Chinese mind except in time of year). A week ago, they celebrated “Tomb-sweeping Day,” as it has been translated. The literal translation is actually “clear & bright holiday,” but that doesn’t help us poor foreigners understand anything about the day, so Tomb-sweeping Day is a more convenient name. Traditionally, it’s a day to pay respects to the dead. Nowadays, while they still do that, it seems to also be a sort of national Spring Cleaning Day. Haha! But hey, three days off is three days off… except, of course, when you’re in China and they consider a Saturday-Sunday-Monday holiday to be three days off. Let’s be realistic here, that’s only one day out of class!

 

Figuring I should probably honor this my first experience of Tomb-Sweeping Day in some way, but having no dead relatives buried here in China to go visit, I decided to go to the park. The park does happen to be for a dead person – some important person from the Qing dynasty, although he never actually was the emperor. And that important person (who’s name I can’t remember at the moment… obviously, he was very dear to my heart) is buried in a huge tomb in the park, with impressive buildings and walls around the area. The main part of the park costs 6 kuai to get in (about a dollar); the tomb area, with the walls, buildings, and a big mound of dirt that is supposedly his tomb, costs an extra 30 kuai. Clearly, the main part of the park was all the more I needed to see… but Chinese will be Chinese.  The first day I went, I was with a Chinese friend. He wanted to make sure I saw the “highlight” of the park, which happens to be that large mound of dirt, so I had to pay the extra 30 kuai. Convenient.

 

That’s why the second and third times I went to the same park during our three day holiday I went with foreigners. They had enough sense to not pay 5 bucks for a mound of dirt.

 

The most entertaining trip, though, had to have been the last one. We were just hanging out in the park in the evening, after dinner. In fact, my trips got cheaper each time, because the last time we didn’t go until after 6 p.m., so the 6 kuai part was actually free. Woot! But yeah, we were just hanging out, talking, wandering around the largest non-built-up, relatively natural looking area of land for kilometers. (Wow, that just doesn’t sound the same to say “kilometers” there instead of “miles.”) What we didn’t know… oops… was that the park actually closes, and the gates lock, at 10 p.m. Hehe. We happened to still be inside at that point, and no where near the gates to realize that they were being locked. Yeah, it was quite the surprise when we finally decided we were cold and ready to go home and… we couldn’t get out.

 

Climbing over the wall seemed like a good idea at first, but then we realized how high and smooth the walls were, making them superbly difficult to climb.  So we wandered around a bit to see if there might be another gate. That didn’t work either; we just got lost. (It’s actually a surprisingly big park.) Thankfully, in our wanderings we happened upon another lost soul, so we stopped him and asked how we could get out. He pointed us to the security office, but said he couldn’t go with us. What that gentleman was doing there that he didn’t want the security guys to know about, I have no idea. I’m just grateful he was there to assist us.

 

Sure enough, the security office had guards inside. They were surprised when someone knocked on the door inside the park, and then were even more surprised when it was foreigners knocking. They weren’t particularly thrilled to see us, but we just threw in a nice 不好意思！(I’m embarrassed), which is the most amazing phrase in all of Chinese. If said with the right facial expressions, this phrase can get a foreigner out of just about any potentially bad situation.

 

And it worked that night. They let us walk through the office to the outside world, and we were home-free. Whew.

Not all learning comes from a book

The first month of the spring semester in China has just ended, so it seems like a good time to do a little reflection. What have I learned? While my vocabulary might not have improved as much as I had hoped, and my pronunciation seems more or less the same in my mind, I certainly have plenty of stories and thoughts to share from this month of class.

 

Though none of my classmates would ever admit to it, I think the best class we have this semester might very well be our Chinese Culture class. The reason no one would admit it is because the good thing about the class has nothing to do with the subject he lectures on or how interesting it is. Admittedly, most of us are really struggling to stay awake at 8:30 Wednesday morning when we get into that room and start hearing our teacher’s impressively monotone voice (impressive because Chinese is a tonal language). But this is why I say it’s a good class: we are learning first-hand what the Chinese education system is like. We walk into class, sit down, take out paper, and take notes quietly for an hour and a half as the teacher talks. He never stops. He never slows down. He just talks. He tells us what we should know, and it is our job to learn it. Sure, I’ve learned a few interesting bits of information from the content of his lectures, but mostly I’m not too terribly interested in studying the elevation changes across China or the names of all the different changes the Chinese characters have gone through in the past several thousand years. But I’ve learned a lot from his approach, understanding that he is a typical older Chinese gentleman who only knows one method of education (even when his students hardly speak Chinese!).

 

The one interesting topic our Culture teacher discussed was about the 56 ethnic groups in China. Having studied this country for several years already, I obviously already knew some of what he talked about, but I was struck by his representation of the relationship between the Han Chinese (the majority group, constituting appr. 92% of the whole population) and the 55 minority groups, and the importance of the issue at the national level. According to our book, the 8% of the population that is of minority descent controls/lives on nearly 64% of the total land in China, leaving only 36% of China to the other 92% of the population. Furthermore, the 36% that the Han live on is primarily in the Beijing-to-Shanghai area, leaving the minority groups to live on the periphery. All of a sudden, I understand why the government has established so many laws that favor the minorities.

 

I have the same teacher for my Watching Movies class at the end of the week. (Okay, okay, the literal translation of the course name is “Watch, Listen, Speak,” but really it’s just a watching movies class. Woo-hoo!) Most of the time we’re just watching Zhang Yimo movies (he’s a famous Chinese director), but of course our teacher enjoys lecturing so sometimes gets off on various tangents about the movies. I was particularly tickled the other day when he started giving us some photography lessons based on the cinematography of the movie. How bizarre to think I could understand someone talking about such things in Chinese!

 

My Speaking class is what we call “ma ma hu hu” in Chinese. Literally translated, that’s “horse horse tiger tiger,” but that obviously doesn’t make any sense. It just means so-so. Mediocre. Ma ma hu hu. The problem in my speaking class is that the teacher doesn’t like when we speak. At least, she doesn’t like when we speak our own things, when we don’t just use the exact sentences that are in the book. Seriously, our homework this weekend is to memorize one of the texts, word for word. Because clearly, being able to recite three unknown individual’s perspectives on the internet is going to come in handy one of these days. (Sense the sarcasm…) But that’s just one of those “Chinese approach to education” things.  The most bizarre of our speaking classes so far, though, was the day we were talking about the problems related to aging populations (for the up-teenth day in a row) and she brought in a song related to the topic. Not only did she manage to find a song about such a thing, but she brought it in and made us sing it out loud together. Talk about an awkward class!

 

My favorite class, and hands-down the best class in terms of content and teacher, is my Writing class. Every week I have to write an essay in Chinese (400+ characters, which is maybe like a 200 word essay in English? So not too long). It’s been a really good opportunity to get some feedback on writing style and structure, besides being good to get back into the habit of organizing and writing essays. But I really had to laugh to myself the night I had to avoid going out and experiencing China in order to stay in my room and write an essay about alligators. What a strange experience, to write an essay in Chinese explaining to my teacher and classmates how to get away from an alligator if they are ever being attacked by one. Because, of course, that’s likely to happen around here!

 

A few other random things I’ve learned from class this month: There are 100 million people in China with the last name “Li” (Lee). Traditional Chinese music only has the five notes, do, re, mi, so, and la. I learned the Chinese term for unrequited love, which is a term I’m not even sure I know how to use in English. For some reason, using liquid laundry detergent is supposedly better for the environment than using powdered (I just don’t know why). And finally, the cause of every problem in China can be understood by one simple sentence: 人太多！(“ren tai duo!” – Too many people!)

 

Really, my Belgian friend and I have started counting every time we hear that claim as an excuse/cause for some situation, and to date, every single one of my teachers has used it at least once. There was one day I heard it 4 times before noon.