Jewelry Party

One of the gifts I decided to give to some of my friends here involved more of an experience than just a simple thing in hand. When I was in Arizona, I wanted to find something to give that had an air of 'desert'. My stepmom gave me the idea to make some jewelry out of some polished stones she had. I brought back the materials with me and invited some lovely ladies to a party in my room. 

We unapologetically put on Frozen, ate homemade brownies with peanut butter frosting, and got to work. I showed the girls how to wrap the stones so that they wouldn't fall out, and also how to make designs. I'm impressed with their display of individuality and creativity. 

Reading Out Loud

In class, my teacher has me read Tuan Yuan, a children's book about Chinese New Year. The main character, a little girl, is excited for her dad to come for his yearly visit. She doesn't recognize him at first, but after shaving his beard and changing his clothes, she sees that he's the dad she's used to. He makes a treat for the family, hiding a coin in one of the dumplings. He says whoever bites into that particular piece will receive good luck. 

The following morning, the little girl bites into it and finds her good luck coin. She carries the coin around everywhere after that. Her dad only stays for another few days, during which time they do all the traditional and fun things that people do during the new year. The days before he leaves, the girl discovers her pocket with her lucky coin is empty! After looking everywhere all day she is devastated that she has lost her coin, even refusing to let her dad give her another one. 

Luckily, she does actually find the coin. The next day she wakes up to find her dad preparing to leave. As she hugs him goodbye, she says she wants him to have the coin and to make the special treat again on his next visit in another year.

I stand in front of the class reading this book aloud in Chinese to my classmates, the two girls nearest helping me with the characters I don't know, which admittedly, is not as many as I would have thought. We get to the page where the girl hugs her dad goodbye and suddenly I choke up. I barely finish the story without large, wet tears gathering in my eyes. 

Yes, I cry in front of the whole class. Little do I know that someone is taking pictures!

In my supervisor's class in the afternoon, he also asks me to read a paragraph. Today is just one of those days. "Hopefully ancient philosophy won't make me cry," I think to myself. This time I stumble through not understanding what I'm reading, markedly less fluent than when I read the children's story. I make it through the paragraph and breathe deeply. 

I need to work on reading out loud in Chinese. 

Tickets and Chocolate

A short but sweet story:

The mother of my student, Christy, wants me to teach her how to make American style cookies, similar to the oatmeal raisin cookies we made last fall. Along with this, she asks that I choose one more thing to make. I can choose anything so I decide on the Texas Sheet Cake recipe my mom emailed me just the other day.

We go to a nearby cake shop that also sells some imported goods. I buy some powdered sugar. We are there for 37 minutes. I know it wasn't 36 or 38 minutes because the ticket the police officer printed out makes it very clear: we had been parked illegally for thirty plus seven minutes. 

While my student and I read the ticket (how weird is it that this little Chinese-Korean girl is asking me in English to read the ticket to her in Chinese?), her mom is trying everything to get the officer's attention. She immediately plays the foreigner card, which is funny because I recently played the same card in the U.S. to get out of a parking ticket (Hey, I was a visiting scholar from China!). She brings out her Korean "eggyo," what we might refer to as baby-talk for grown women, usually reserved for boyfriends, but I'm sure this wasn't the first officer to be exposed to its charms. 

The problem was that she had changed bags before leaving the house and so didn't have a thing on her, not her driver's license, not her passport, not even her phone. What she had in the large handbag is beyond me. I let her use my phone to contact her husband, which I then saw her force onto two other people's ears, the officer included. By this time I had already guffawed inside the car more than once, but poor Isabelle was as worked up as her mother. She even tried to tell me that she had once gotten out of a ticket by crying. She's 8. I highly doubt the credibility of this story. Next she acts out what she will do to the police officer if he tries to arrest her mom. I think a kick in a highly susceptible place was involved, poor guy.

"Change bags or whatever. If you don't have your driver's license I don't want to hear it!" We hear the officer shout. After all her pleading, Christy gets back in the car and we are free to go. Her fine is 300 RMB, which I'm unclear whether she will really have to pay or not, what with all her husband's top tier connections she keeps mentioning. 

"The officer didn't believe I'm a foreigner," she added as she turned onto the main road. "He thought I was from the South, like Jiangxi or somewhere like that." To this, I really did have to laugh!

Later, after taking me to Changchun's newest mega-mart, Metro, to get some ingredients for the baked goods we were going to make, we go home and get to work. Isabelle helps where she can, although I've never seen a child so scared of a mixer. To think today is her first time getting to lick the beaters afterward! We used to fight for those in my family.

We have to cut the cake recipe in half for lack of a full-size oven and matching cookie sheet. It turns out sweet and chocolatey anyway, to which I breath a sigh of relief. The cookies also turn out nicely, although omitting the oatmeal makes them spread pretty thin. I hope they work out for Christy when she bakes them herself. I leave the house with a sugar high ready to get home and finish an assignment for my class the next day.

The Other "Shi"

孟子谓万章日：“一乡之善士，斯友一乡之善士；一国之善士，斯友一国之善士；天下之善士，斯友天下之善士。以友天下之善士为未足，又尚论古之人。颂其诗，诗其书，不知其人，可乎？是以论其世也。是尚友也。”

《孟子•万章下》

Mencius said to Wan-zhang, "A good shi in one small community will befriend the other good shi of that community. The good shi of a single state will befriend the other good shi of that state. The good shi of the whole world will befriend the other good shi of the whole world. But if befriending the good shi of the whole world is not enough, then one may go further to consider the ancients. Yet is it acceptable to recite their poems and read their books without knowing what kind of persons they were? Therefore one considers the age in which they lived. This is 'going on further to make friends.'"

--Mencius V.B.8.ii

I've been thinking about communities all day. As I rode the bus to tutoring I realized that it might be something I lack at the moment, and in a different bus on the way back I remembered what it felt like to be a part of one, albeit rather unknowingly. Walking around campus I thought back to the groups I had been in growing up. From church groups to choir, the full weight of their influence and routine perhaps finally hit me. 

What community do I belong to here? With my realization came a wave of alone-ness as well as another wave of realizations. For better or worse, I am what the above quote refers to as "shi" 【士】, someone who is neither peasant nor royalty, neither predisposed to hardships nor immune to them. Also, I have the added benefit of having had the opportunity for an education, and a unique one at that. According to Mencius, this makes it possible for me to 'go on further to make friends,' which I have done and continue to do. If I belong to any community at the moment it is the ever-shifting, international community at large. 

Yet, on days like today, one would really like to just come across that "other good shi."

Before coming home, I took my "shi" self to the market to buy bread. I plugged in some music and after a Cher soul-jam I entered the small street where the evening market is held daily. The soundtrack in my ears gave me an opportunity to just watch life around me, and more importantly, to be a part of it. After all, we all stood in line for honey-pumpkin muffins and sampled fresh strawberries. We all bargained and were given a little extra kimchi. We all watched small children ride their toy cars in the street and excused ourselves as elderly people passed by. It wasn't just me who was tempted to buy that soy milk being so desperately hawked, and it certainly serves us all to find out what perilla seed is.

 

Communities are always changing and that's because people change. To put a new spin on Mencius' wise words, to know who we are we have to consider the age we live in now. To put it simply, more for myself than anyone, we have to remain present.