Aron Bothman

old lady character design

2012-02-19T14:42:00.000-08:00

sculpture turnaround

old lady character design turnaround

2012-02-19T14:41:00.001-08:00

portrait sculpture turnaround

2012-02-19T14:40:00.001-08:00

portrait of my neighbor. sculpey

scrunch expression turnaround

2012-02-19T14:39:00.001-08:00

expression study: stretch

2012-02-19T14:38:00.002-08:00

sculpture turnaround

lizzie puppet turnaround

2012-02-19T14:38:00.001-08:00

sculpture turnaround for in-progress puppet design

self-portrait sculpture turnaround

2012-02-19T14:36:00.001-08:00

Placerita

2012-02-12T17:45:00.000-08:00

Sycamore and streambed.

raggedy ann test

2012-02-10T00:34:00.001-08:00

stop motion test, week 3. the assignment was to do a cycle. doll + armature wire + compositing.

raggedy maya

2012-02-07T19:03:00.000-08:00

3d model based on some photos based on a sculpture based on some drawings of a character concept

canyon behind calarts

2012-02-03T16:17:00.000-08:00

Friday morning. Trying to use more transparency to make brighter colors. Usually I use a sharpie and then cover it with a red underpainting, which helps the colors pop but mostly prevents glazing, which gets the best lights.

Stop Motion Week 2

2012-02-02T11:31:00.000-08:00

Ball bounce/morph.

The raw footage, stitched together in After Effects:

sycamores, wind

2012-01-28T13:53:00.000-08:00

saturday morning at placerita

stop motion test - week 1

2012-01-28T13:51:00.000-08:00

sculpey + paxton gate taxidermy eye

raggedy ann in perspective

2012-01-23T19:05:00.000-08:00

For perspective class: establishing eyeline and placing characters in space. Current-ish iteration of Raggedy Ann.

oak grove

2012-01-22T15:38:00.001-08:00

in Placerita Canyon. Sunday!

placerita, saturday

2012-01-21T16:47:00.001-08:00

Canyon trail with Isaac

placerita trail

2012-01-20T23:53:00.000-08:00

With Eusong and Jeeyoon, Friday morning.

Life Draw Jan. 19

2012-01-20T00:51:00.000-08:00

Russian (?) model in Edwardiana

Life Draw

2012-01-20T00:20:00.000-08:00

Mentryville

2012-01-16T00:59:00.000-08:00

Plein air painting about 3 miles from CalArts. Some sort of mobile fluid storage vehicle? Mentryville is an oil ghost town, apparently, founded 1870.

2012-01-01T01:08:00.000-08:00

Sycamore

2011-12-30T01:05:00.000-08:00

In Santa Barbara behind the Rose Garden.

2011-12-27T01:11:00.000-08:00

Nira, in Los Padres forest. Early morning.

2011-12-27T01:09:00.000-08:00

2011-12-19T01:06:00.000-08:00

2011-12-18T01:08:00.000-08:00

Wilcox trail, early evening.

Raggedy Ann Maquette

2011-12-05T01:02:00.000-08:00

Life Draw

2011-12-01T01:16:00.000-08:00

Raggedy Ann Concept

2011-11-20T01:15:00.000-08:00

Character design class. Raggedy Ann turns into a 1940s USO dancer when no adults are looking.

Charlie in the Park

2011-11-01T01:13:00.000-07:00

Character design class. Google the limerick.

Life Draw

2011-10-01T01:18:00.000-07:00

Steve showed us Searle animations before assigning this twig-and-ink set.

polka

2008-06-27T23:58:00.000-07:00

Reno, one of the freshmen, playing at the English majors' speech contest a couple weeks ago. He stopped taking lessons after the only accordion teacher in Jishou got arthritis.

anthropomorphic pig robot

2008-06-25T17:28:00.000-07:00

He lives in the mall area, where he walks around in circles dragging kids around in a cart.

KFC

2008-06-25T02:48:00.000-07:00

It finally happened: Jishou has a KFC. Five of my students have jobs there. The interviews were apparently extremely competitive, and most of the girls who got hired already had some karaoke hall waiting experience. The training process seemed pretty intense, and required them to go to the nearest KFC (a two hour train ride away, in the next prefecture over) to apprentice for a weekend. I don't really understand why so many people want the job—the starting wage is 8.6 yuan an hour, which is about half what they can get for tutoring primary school students. At least two of them could easily get tutoring jobs, which must mean I'm missing something.

One of the students invited me to the opening party on Monday. I could only stay for half an hour, but the party involved speeches (from which I learned that China already has 2,560 KFC locations), free food, and dancing waitresses (barely visible behind the leftmost student below).

KFC's success has been explained to me as having a lot to do with young people wanting to date—in Chinese restaurants, people generally get up and leave as soon as the last bite of food is eaten, and it's uncommon to linger for conversation. But at KFC, a boy and a girl can order a soda with two straws and stare into each other's eyes for three hours. McDonalds tends to arrive after KFC, and goes more for the kids' birthday party market. (This is all cribbed almost word-for-word from a conversation I had with a PiA alum in Beijing.)

Above: happy cartoon stomachs on the KFC placemats. The white-on-red text says: "good habits for scientific eating."

--

The Happy Traveler, our school's student English magazine, recently had an essay contest. I've copied the winning essay below. (The photo is from the essay contest awards ceremony. The author, Kiki, is second from left, in white.)

Tonight, while listening to a National English Speaking Competition I saw the words: “No one is born a winner or a loser.” Suddenly, I realized that I can use this sentence as my compositions topic.

I have been in the Normal College of Jishou University for about one year. I took part in so many competitions, but unfortunately, I failed every one, not only in our college, but also in our class.

Another thing that deeply touched me was: today, I interviewed for a job at KFC. While I writing my composition, I don't know the KFC manager's decision, whether to hire me or not. Frankly speaking, in my opinion, I think I failed this time. That doesn't mean I'm not confident. The reason is that I didn't prepare for the interview. The manager asked me: “Do you have some questions to ask me?” Waiting a short time, I smiled at him and said: “I am sorry. I have not thought it out, yet.”

When I got back to the dormitory, I told the experience to my roommates. Anna said: “Once I read a book, it said: “If you don't ask the manager a question that says you don't care about this job.” Then I recognized maybe I had failed.

But now, I read the words: “No one is born a winner or a loser.” I have a lot of feelings. I think even though, I have failed so many times, I can gain so much experience form all these things. Just as saying goes: “Failure is the mother of success.” I think in the future, I will not lose my courage, I will be more confident. Even though, I have failed so many times. I will overcome all my difficulties one day.

So, next time you will see a completely new me. I will try my best to reach my goals, and will never give up.

I believe firmly that I am not always a loser. I will become a winner.

Test prep

2008-06-18T19:36:00.000-07:00

A lot of my sophomores are going to Changsha this weekend to take the College English Test or CET. It's an optional English assessment that they can only take once and goes on their resume as proof of English ability. They say it's essential for finding jobs that require English skills.

I found a flyer while I was on break from class, posted right across from the department office. It wasn't clear to me at first glance what it was, so I took it into my freshman class and asked them about it. They thought it was really funny that I'd noticed it, and said it was an ad for a test-cheating service: apparently there are people with connections to the testing system who can give you a copy of the answers beforehand. Another girl told me that the price was probably around 300 yuan. When I asked the sophomores about it, they clammed up and asked me to change the subject. (I doubt they're cheating, if only because 300 yuan is a lot of money for them, but maybe they thought I was accusing them. Dunno.)

Anyway, here's the flyer:

CET-4 and CET-6 Test Assistance!
Many years of experience! Accurate answers! If you don't pass, you don't pay!
NO PAYMENT REQUIRED TILL AFTER THE EXAM! Good prices!

Jishou

2008-06-16T09:33:00.000-07:00

...in panorama. Click to enlarge. Taken from Lover's Peak, 30 minutes' hike from the college. The college is barely visible about 5/8 of the way across from the left, a big brick red building poking up from the hill.

Lover's Peak has a spring at the top. The spring is a big concrete block at the base of a waterfall with two faucets coming out of it. A lot of people haul their water jugs up to the top to collect the spring water, which is delicious. I hiked up with several students last week.

This is a small cinderblock altar that someone set up next to the spring.

Some rice fields just above the spring.

The Story of Coal

2008-06-15T21:39:00.000-07:00

There's a used book and magazine stand outside my favorite clay pot restaurant with a fixed price of one yuan for anything. A couple weeks ago, I noticed some books with really Cultural Revolution-style woodcut covers, and bought them. One is from 1975, and is called The Story of Coal. The other seems to be a 1982 translation of an American novel. Some images below.

I really like the silhouette and the woodcut approximation of folds of cloth.

Spot illustrations from The Story of Coal.

Pictures

2008-04-28T17:07:00.000-07:00

I realize I sort of stopped posting in December after my apartment was broken into and my laptop stolen. I've been using a desktop with a CRT monitor since then, which means that sitting in front of the computer for hours is much less enjoyable than it used to be, which I think is mostly a good thing. Anyway, I'll try to start posting again, hopefully the habit will stick.

After several months of reading James Gurney's blog, I've started trying to sketch regularly. The following images are: a statue of Luo Shengjiao, a distinguished alumnus of our school who threw himself into a freezing river to save a drowning girl and died in the process; a stone lion, one of a whole zoo of animals carved out of living rock on Huaguo Mountain behind the school.

Hanukkah

2007-12-10T05:47:00.000-08:00

Had a Hanukkah party over the weekend. All four of the other Jishou Americans came over, as well as a German, Bjorn, who comes to Jishou on weekends to teach language classes. I assume Bjorn hadn't really heard of the holiday before and read the basic facts off Wikipedia right before he came, because as soon as he walked in the door he handed me a big bag of white candles. We made some pretty good latkes and played Mahjong till midnight.

Speaking of Jews in China, I bought these books last week after hearing about them at English Corner from a senior at the college.

What really grabbed my attention was the following passage in the preface of The Complete Book of Jewish Wisdom (which is a better translation of the title of the first book above):

The Jews are extraordinarily intelligent, and depend on their cleverness
and talent to invigorate to every field of activity in the world. Among the most prominent are Heine, Beethoven, Marx, Einstein, Freud, Chaplin, Picasso, and so on.

I've decided that I want to try and translate this book. I'll work on it a little bit every day and post the translation in sections. It should be good Chinese practice, and if nothing else, it'll get me to blog more regularly.

Illustrated!

2007-10-18T07:42:00.000-07:00

I went to my first meeting of the Student Art Association last week, where I spent an hour and a half drawing a still life setup with the sketching section of the class. The focus of the composition was a broken bust of Gorky, the identity of which I wouldn't have known except that a couple of the students mentioned it. The Chinese seem to like Gorky a lot: his portrait hangs in two of my classrooms alongside those of Marx and Lenin, and I remember a Chinese teacher quoting him in class during the summer Chinese course I took last year. Whatever else can be said about him, his mustache is pretty impressive.

--

Some students took me on a hike last weekend in the hills behind the school. It was great. First we walked up one hill with a spring at the peak where a lot of people get their drinking water. We passed three hills covered in tombs (Chinese custom apparently dictates that people be buried on mountains) on our way down to a tangerine grove, where we bought some fruit. You could see into the next valley over, which seemed to be mostly farmland. I took these pictures of Jishou from near where the spring was. My school would be somewhere near the lower left of the picture.

--

Season 3, Episode 8 from my bootlegged set of Arrested Development DVDs gave me one more reason not to bring the show into class:

The actual dialogue (GOB speaking): I'm dating this Christian girl right now. She wants me to be honest and reconnect with my son, and I'm trying to get her to renounce God and **** me.

What the Chinese subtitles say (translated back into English): I'm having some problems with my girlfriend. She wants me to become a better person and to reconnect with my son, and I want to help her become a better girl.

Devotees (Andy) will also appreciate that "hot ham water" is translated as "hot ham soup," effectively killing another pretty good joke.

Chicken, chickens

2007-10-08T09:29:00.001-07:00

Just finished a trip to Chongqing and the Three Gorges Dam during the week long National Day holiday, and I'm back to teaching. I've noticed before that a lot of Chinese people seem to have trouble with "much" vs. "many," so I did a lesson with my freshmen on count and non-count nouns. A chalkboard illustration:

The diagrams above represent:

A little chicken
A little chicken
A few chickens
A lot of chicken
A lot of chickens

Chinese actually has a much easier distinction between count and non-count nouns than English has: every noun is understood to be a mass noun unless you specify otherwise. This gets rid of some of the arbitrariness (since you don't have to memorize the class of noun to which a given word belongs) but adds some new arbitrariness (since there are dozens of different "unit" words that you use to distinguish count from non-count nouns, and while there are some rules as to how to use them (i.e. there's one count word for big things with a stable base, one for long skinny things, and so on), there's still a lot of memorization involved). Given what seems like it'd be a pretty intuitive distinction, it's not clear to me why Chinese people would have trouble with "many" vs. "much," but I've heard the mistake often enough that it seemed like it'd be worth going over in class.

Good lesson

2007-10-01T10:42:00.000-07:00

Dan and I both did lessons on gay marriage this week (or rather, Dan came over to discuss a lesson he was planning for his third-years on gay marriage, and I borrowed it for my sophomores). Getting the class to talk can be hard: if the students ever get the feeling that the foreign teacher is asking them to comment on something they recognize as controversial, they clam up pretty fast. So the major appeal of gay marriage as a discussion topic was that it was interesting, politically relevant, and comfortably distant from China.

I spent the first hour of class lecturing and introducing vocab ("liberal" and "conservative" were new words for them). The students really like seeing pictures, and really like hearing about my personal experience; so when I was explaining the legalization issues in California, I showed them some pictures of the San Francisco City Hall, and told them about driving to the Asian Art Museum with my family and seeing a line of hundreds of couples stretching around the whole block. When I asked for questions, one girl raised her hand and asked, if California had a law banning gay marriage, how was the mayor of San Francisco able to declare it legal? which seemed like a good question as far as comprehension. It seemed to go over pretty well, overall. During the second hour of class, I had them do a "debate": I assigned half of the class to argue that gay marriage should be legal in America, and the other half to argue that it should be illegal. I gave them fifteen minutes to prepare arguments, and then had students come one at a time to the podium at the front of class to speak for two minutes or so, alternating "for" and "against." Something surprising came out of this. I'd taken a seat at the back of the classroom and told them that they had to speak clearly enough for me to be able to hear. The result of this was that because I wasn't at the front of the class moderating, the students got a lot more confident -- students started to ask questions of whoever was behind the podium about points he or she had raised, and the speaker would answer them. Seeing them discuss without any prompting was great, and while it isn't something I can take any credit for -- the fact that they were able to do that must reflect some previous experience with classroom debates -- it was good to know that I'd hit on a topic and format that they could get enthusiastic about.

My students are, perhaps predictably, pretty conservative on the topic of gay marriage: several of the students I'd assigned to the "for" side complained to me that they didn't think it was true, so they couldn't come up with any reasons. During the debate itself, they came up with a lot of the same talking points that you'd expect Americans to bring up: on the "for" side, there was a lot of legal equality for all and love can't be legislated; on the "against" side, a lot of arguments from tradition, it's bad for the children, and such. Another popular argument against was that it was a selfish thing to do, and that potential gay couples should think about how sad it would make their parents and friends. I don't think I'd ever heard this before, and it struck me as particularly Chinese.

Because most of the English I speak is to students with limited English ability, I'm starting to pick up some new speech habits, like shouting, overenunciating, and hypersensitivity to whether I've missed some crucial bit of background information. These habits have been seeping into otherwise ordinary conversations: with Dan over lunch, for instance, or on the phone with my parents. I expect that by the time I come back to America, the habit will be pretty much ingrained, and I'll be pretty annoying to talk to for a couple weeks.

School

2007-09-23T09:58:00.000-07:00

Jishou Teacher's College is sort of a bottom-tier institution: most of the students come from Hunanese farming families, and ended up here because they couldn't get in anyplace else and because teaching is a lot better than farming. The Teacher's College is a branch/ugly little brother of the much larger Jishou University, whose main campus is on the other end of town. (The main difference between the two is that the College grants three-year degrees that are basically pre-professional, while the University grants four-year academic degrees.)

The Friday before the freshmen began classes (which, since there is a period of mandatory basic military training for all incoming freshmen, was about three weeks into the regular semester), I was called into the Teaching Affairs Office to help interview transfers into the English major. There were incoming freshmen who had been accepted into the college in some department other than English and now wanted to transfer into the English major. English is the most popular major at the school -- the assumption is that a student's career prospects are going to be a lot better coming out of a teacher's college with a degree in English than in, say, in Primary Education (most of my students say they want to work for a foreign company after graduating). There were about fifteen applicants and six open spots, and the interview consisted of me and two Chinese members of the faculty asking simple questions in English (like, Why do you want to study English? or Can you tell us about your hometown?). The students were for the most part so nervous they could hardly talk -- partly because I don't think they were expecting to see a foreign teacher, partly because one of the Chinese teachers was pretty aggressive in asking questions, and partly because the interview was going to decide a lot about their future. It made me a little uncomfortable to know that I was responsible for an interview, and also to know that the decision was being made based on questions that were often less than perfectly grammatical. But in the end, there were six candidates who were much better than the rest, so now they're my students.

--

One of my classrooms. Each grade within the English major is divided into several sections, each of which takes all its classes together. The schedule is structured such that a class is always in the same room, and the teachers come and go each period. All my classrooms have the teacher standing on a raised platform at the front. Several of my classrooms are decorated with posters of famous Communists with inspirational quotes in Chinese ("Fewer pretty words, more plain deeds!" -Lenin). When Dan moved into his apartment, there was a giant poster of Stalin on the wall of his living room. There were foreign teachers living in the apartment before Dan arrived, so this was probably China-kitsch rather than genuine decoration, but even so it was hard to keep a straight face when the College people were showing us around.

--

Some figures, anecdotal.

Tuition, Jishou Teacher's College: 2225 RMB/semester

Standard teacher's salaries, urban:

Primary: 800-1000 RMB/month
Secondary: approx. 1200 RMB/month
College instructor: approx. 2000 RMB/month
College professor or specialist: 3000-4000 RMB/month

Standard teacher's salaries, rural:

Primary: 400-500 RMB/month
Secondary: 700-800 RMB/month

(One dollar is around 7.5 RMB.)

Guangzhou, again

2007-09-19T22:39:00.000-07:00

We had a couple days off due to the upcoming festival, so I went to Guangzhou to visit Thomas and David, the Princeton in Asia teachers there. It was fun. Thomas and I get along well, which probably owes a lot to the fact that we both lived in the sixties-holdover co-ops at our respective big public schools (he went to Michigan, which has a co-op system a lot like Berkeley's), and the similarities in disposition that implies. Some photos:

What I found most striking about Guangzhou as a landscape was that banyan trees are everywhere. The younger ones are indistinguishable from any other kind of ficus tree except for the mass of reddish stringy roots that hangs below the foliage (this is usually kept trimmed somewhere above head level). Some that we saw must have been a hundred years old or more (the most impressive that we saw were on Shamian Island, which is the sandspit where the French and English colonial headquarters used to be) and had two or three trunks enmeshed in twisting roots. This picture is from Yuexiu Park, which occupies a big part of the north of the city. The tree is growing over a piece of the old city wall that runs through the park.

This sign was over every urinal in Yuexiu Park. The translation would run something like: "One small step closer to the urinal is one huge step towards being civilized." (Note: I know I'm kind of invoking it here, but "Oh, those Chinese and their funny ways" is a trope I actually kind of hate.)

We went to a big wholesale market in serch of Christmas lights for our respective apartments and finally found them at a Christmas supplies vendor.

We went to IKEA. Thomas bought Swedish meatballs and a picture frame. I bought coffee and a bedspread cover (the one that came with the apartment furnishings is an autumn leaf pattern that at first glance suggests someone having bled all over the surface of the bed) and some desk lamps. This guy was hanging out in the living room display section. It seemed photo-worthy. (Note: "East meets West" is another trope I actually kind of hate.)

--

Brought my Collected Nonfiction of Joan Didion for reading on the train and plane. Finished The White Album and Salvador. Fact: Joan Didion's first Berkeley residence (the Tri-Delt sorority) is right across Warring Street from my last Berkeley residence (Castro co-op). There was some plot among the co-opers at some point to steal one of the big deltas that formed the sign on their house, this made me feel a little guilty in retrospect.

Comic art in China

2007-09-05T21:06:00.000-07:00

During the couple days Dan and I had had to kill in Guangzhou, we went to the art museum there. The museum has a permanent exhibit devoted to a cartoonist named Liao Bingxiong, whose career encompassed WWII, the Liberation, and the Cultural Revolution. The work was amazing, I found a couple images online:

This painting is from 1957. The left column of text reads: "Flowers must all point upwards. The sun is only permitted to rise. Pictures of people must be smiling. These are the three clear admonitions for artists."

Titled "Self-mockery," painted in 1979, three years after the Cultural Revolution ended. This seems to be the iconic Liao Bingxiong image: it had a wall to itself in the gallery, and was the most reproduced on the web of all his work. Liao: "What evil was it that imprisoned good people, stuffed them into jars to become deformed? Why, when the jars imprisoning them were broken, were they still curled up, immobile, struck dumb with fear? This painting is me and you and countless others. How is it that thirty years after we all hailed a nation finally risen to its feet, a people taking their stand at last -- how is it that we still can't stand up?" (Note: not a very rigorous translation.)

If these pieces seem grim and devoid of much hope, I'd say that pretty much sums up the exhibit. What may not come through in these samples is that the work was on the whole very funny. One particularly bright spot was a set of about twenty small paintings labeled as set designs. They seemed to be gouache, and were painted in a way that reminded me of old animation backgrounds.

The art museum itself was sort of a strange place: three floors, 20,000 square meters, a huge number of individual galleries and exhibits, and no visitors besides us in the whole place on a Sunday afternoon. Some other people finally showed up around four or five, including a kid cruising down the marble floor on roller skates.

--

Postscript to the last entry: I'm pretty sure that I had this picture somewhere in the back of my mind while I was painting the self-portrait in the last post. This is William Holman-Hunt's portrait of a young Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Rainy days

2007-09-03T09:11:00.000-07:00

I'm finishing up preparations for my first day of class, but thought I'd put this up since I've been bad about posting lately. It's been raining pretty steadily over the last couple days, so I decided to try to learn how to use the set of gouache paints I bought at the Art Museum in Guangzhou. Since I couldn't go outside to sketch and apparently have deeply narcissistic tendencies, I decided to try a self-portrait.

So far, gouache seems to allow me better than any other medium to express my obsessive attention to detail, which is both good and bad. I should learn how to do this sort of sketch faster; I should also break out the other colors at some point. Also, if the picture quality isn't so great, it's because the image is a digital photo, not a scan. I'm still considering this as "in progress" at this point (see: hair, ears, anything below the chin), although I doubt I'll work on it much more now that school has started and the rain has stopped.

Hands

2007-08-06T20:44:00.000-07:00

Haven't been posting much lately, but here's a shot from a project I've been working on for BCM. Done in Flash, intended for animation.
Getting close to my departure. I'm going to try and get in the habit of posting more regularly, especially once I get to China.

Costumes

2006-12-23T00:29:00.001-08:00

The theme for the end-of-semester banquet at my co-op was "Bilbo's Eleventy-First Birthday." I went as Bilbo Baggins, and made what I consider to be some fairly successful (if somewhat pubic) hobbit-feet. The fur is twine, unwound into its component threads and painted brown, and attached to my feet with liquid latex (same material I used for the Halloween costume, which is the second picture below).

Massive Attack + DJ Shadow

2006-09-25T08:34:00.000-07:00

Illustration for the Daily Cal review of the Massive Attack/DJ Shadow concert Friday night. The nonsensicality comes with the deadline, I guess.

Thunderstorm

2006-08-01T04:39:00.000-07:00

It's thunderstorming outside, and I'm sitting at my desk listening to NPR and drinking hot chocolate. Making hot chocolate was actually kind of an endeavor, requiring me to mix a bar of hazelnut chocolate with boiling water and powdered milk. The resulting concoction is rich and sweet, very good once I fished the hazelnuts out.

As the thunderstorm hit, I was engaged in what has become my favorite after-class activity, namely riding around on the bike I bought on Tuesday. It's a fairly sturdy mountain bike with a fresh coat of silver paint, which I assume means it was either ugly or stolen before being resold. Despite the stories (all true) you've probably heard about Chinese drivers and traffic, bicycling seems fairly safe: every street has a pretty broad bike lane; and even though cars, cyclists, and pedestrians all tend to disregard traffic lights when they can, nobody's going very fast. My bike is a one-speed, but that's okay since the entire city of Beijing is totally flat.

Tomorrow will be my sixth day of class, which means that my program is about 25% finished. I got my final class placement two days ago: I'm in the fourth level (where the first is designed for students with no exposure to Chinese and the sixth is for fluent speakers), which is hard enough that I can't actually keep up without doing a couple hours of preparation every night. It seems like a good course, though, especially the reading and writing portion: the each chapter of the textbook consists of four articles from different newspapers about the same event. Formal writing is the biggest gap in my knowledge, so I'm hoping this will help some.

My dorm situation is pretty comfortable: in addition to a bed and a desk, my room now has two clotheslines running across it; a bowl for washing fruit; teacups and four kinds of tea as well as instant coffee; and a pair of the kind of black cloth slippers that old Chinese men wear. My roommate is a National Guard accountant who's getting married two weeks after the program ends. I forgot his name within a couple minutes of meeting him, but that's not really the sort of thing you can ask again after living in the same room for five days, so I had to resort to some small-scale espionage and obtain the information from a classmate of his (it's Daniel, which is now the name of fully 50% of the roommates I've had, and 75% if you count middle names).

This isn't a particularly meaty entry, but now that I've settled into Beijing I'll hopefully have some more interesting things to report. For now, here are some pictures from a class trip to the Great Wall last weekend. The pictures you've probably seen are of the restored portions of the Wall; however, at the particular place we visited, you could walk past and see an unrestored section, which was a caved-in ruin with a forest growing on top. Pretty, though.

Arrived

2006-07-27T08:20:00.000-07:00

in Beijing yesterday morning on the 6:30 train from Xi'an. My dorm is a caricature of a seedy motel from the 60s or so, complete with mothball smell and mysterious stains on the bedspread, but it has a real bathtub, a view into a garden, and its own internet connection, which is really more than I could have asked for. I'm posting some photos from Xi'an. I imagine I'll work through the photographic backlog eventually, but these are the most recent.

This is Jenny. Her English is great, and she's generally a joy to talk to. She's the girl I was talking to about Pearls Before Swine/Zithers Before Cattle.

This is Shaojie, with whom I biked around the city walls (see the last post). He was vaguely connected to Jenny through a German exchange student named Torben who was studying at her university, and I spent a couple evenings hanging out with the three of them (all of us speaking Mandarin, of course). Torben's an interesting guy too: he's even more serious about his Chinese handwriting than I am (his looks like xingshu, a slightly abstract calligraphic style). I remember one time in particular: several of us were hanging around the hostel and I was writing the ancient zhuanshu style character for "country" as part of a disagreement with Liu Yang over its stroke order. When Torben saw me writing, his face lit up and he slammed a zhuanshu dictionary that he'd just bought down on the table, which struck me as the sort of thing I could only have seen myself doing (my second year Chinese teacher has a zhuanshu dictionary, which I visit her to consult a couple times a semester when I need it for art projects; I've been looking for one in the US for a year and a half, with no success).

These are the folks from the Qi Xian Hostel that I got to be pretty good friends with. From left: Xiao Xiang, who took me to the Drum Tower and the Muslim Quarter the first day; Jenny, see above; Xiao Wang, who was reading The Little Prince anthologized in one of his textbooks; Xiao Song, who laughed a lot and would shout "I'll beat you!" whenever I teased her, which was therefore frequently; and Liu Yang, who was really serious about English and made me drill him on the difference between "sculpture" and "statue" when something related came up in conversation once.

This is some sculpted calligraphy from the Great Mosque in the Muslim Quarter. I think it's a Ming Dynasty building, and is an interesting mix of styles: picture a minaret tower with a sloping Chinese roof.

This is my token tourist photo from the Terra Cotta Warriors site. I wasn't expecting to be impressed, but I was: one thing that's not obvious till you're there it's probably 20% excavated, if that, meaning that the museum was actually built up around an active archaeological site.

Oh, let me know if the photos come out funny or something. Since this blog (but not the posting page!) is censored in China, I haven't actually seen it in a couple weeks.

Xi'an, cont'd.

2006-07-25T00:22:00.000-07:00

Besides being a great read and an accurate portrayal of what life is like for most people in the People's Republic of China, Peter Hessler's River Town is chock-full of useful information. For instance, he describes at one point an awe that many Chinese feel when confronted with official documents: this awe let him use his identification as an English teacher to stay in the much cheaper hotels usually reserved for Chinese citizens. Chinese tourist sites tend to have pricey entry fees and much lower student prices (90 yuan and 15 yuan at the terra cotta warriors, respectively); however, telling the ticket agent I'm a student and showing my Cal ID tends generally to get me nothing more than the "get the hell out of my face, I was napping" wave of the hand that irritable middle-aged Chinese women use to such profoundly infuriating effect. Studying the Hessler method, though, I've more or less perfected my routine, which consists of whipping out all my official certificates and filling the ticket desk with paper while rattling off: "This is my acceptance letter from Beijing Language and Culture University. And this is my scholarship notification letter from the National Office of Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language. And this is my identification card from my university in America" as quickly as possible. This has saved me 105 yuan so far in Xi'an, which by coincidence is almost exactly the amount of money I spent today on some woodcuts.

I just had the interesting experience of reading this "Pearls Before Swine" with Jenny, who came to investigate when I laughed out loud while reading on the computer.

Click to enlarge, and all. I guess it shouldn't really come as a surprise, but the amount of cultural knowledge embedded in something like this is massive. I explained savannah animals to her, and the irony of crocodiles living in the suburbs and finding themselves unable to catch their prey; and that Satan as a character often came up in the context of offering what one wanted most in exchange for one's soul; and that the contract was a really important feature of this arrangement; but I think the only thing she found very funny in the end was the way the crocodiles talked. Probably sort of on the weird side of American humor to begin with, come to think of it, and therefore questionable to generalize from, but still. She also asked me what "Pearls Before Swine" meant, and I told her I thought it came from a proverb that had to do with not treating something precious as if it were something ordinary, to which she said, "Oh, China has the same saying: 不要'对牛弹琴,'" the translation of which would be something like "Don't play a zither for a cow" (or, if you just take the four-character phrase, could be construed "Zithers Before Cattle," which made me think I should write to Stephen Pastis and tell him I had a title for him if he ever decided to publish in China). She liked "Calvin and Hobbes," though (I found a couple strips for her on the web), and I promised I'd send her a book once I got home.

One of Xi'an's minor attractions is its Ming Dynasty city wall, which forms a rectangle around the old city 14 kilometers around and 30 feet in breadth. The entrepreners have figured out that tourists will gladly pay 20 yuan to rent a bike and ride the perimeter, which I did this morning with Xie Shaojie, an immensely likeable Russian major from Taibei whose time at the hostel exactly coincided with mine. The northern wall passes right by the railroad, and while we were riding along it a long train fitted with fluid containers passed below: we stopped to watch, and I remarked that my family were all a little dorky and liked to watch trains whenever they went by. He didn't seem to understand the word "dork," though (I had used the English word, never having learned the Chinese equivalent), so I tried to explain using "nerd" and "geek" as synonyms, but he still didn't understand. Finally I said, "What do you call a kid in high school who really likes math, science, and electronics, wears big glasses and doesn't know how to get along with other people?" He said, "If someone is good at math and science in high school, we consider them to be very gifted." He generally seemed flabbergasted that students who studied hard and liked school would receive anything other than adulation at every level: he asked me how it could be, so I tried to explain how a lot of universities emphasize sports for financial reasons, and how that allows someone who's not so good in school to get a big scholarship and then a business degree and a good job; but even though the explanation made sense and probably has some basis in fact, I was pretty conscious that I was making it up as I went along and that I didn't really know. Weird. (He also said that students did in fact look down upon 书呆子, or people who like to read books too much and don't get out into the real world; which as I interpreted it would make humanities types the Chinese version of nerds.)

I've noticed that foreigners in China generally refuse to make eye contact with other foreigners, let alone say "hello" in the street or any such. Trying to preserve some illusion of being solitary explorers of a faraway land across the sea, or something? Eh.

Xi'an

2006-07-22T09:37:00.000-07:00

I'm staying at the best hostel in the world. The building dates from the 1920s: it's a low stone compound built around two big courtyards with big circular gates, and was used as a military command base during WWII. The hostel itself is only a year or so old, and the management seems to have made the commendable decision to hire only charming, chatty English majors from the local university as staffers. I've made pretty good friends with three or four, and this is the second night in a row I've spent six-odd consecutive hours in the common area talking with them: last night I found myself in the odd position of talking about speaking Chinese with a German as we talked about train travel, even though we almost certainly both spoke better English.

Speaking of train travel: my adventure on a hard seat train would have been predictibly miserable if it hadn't been for my seat assignment, which in a bizarre coincidence put me next to the only other foreigners on the train. These were a British couple named Andrew and Karen, who had been teaching English in the backwater city one train station east of Kaifeng; and we saved each other from crowd-induced insanity by means of the usual expat conversaion topics (i.e. talking shit about Bush, Blair, the Chinese education system, and every other easy target available). Hard seat is the lowest class on the Chinese railway system, and they tend to sell about twice as many tickets as there are seats, so the aisles are jam-packed with people sitting or squatting, and people sleeping on newspapers under the seats, and people sitting on (or in) the bathroom sinks. My cheapness/traveler's guilt/desire to see how the other half travels is thoroughly sated at this point.

While I was eating a late dinner in the hostel courtyard with an off-duty staffer named Zhang Ni, I realized how asymmetric my Chinese education has been: talking about the exquisitely composed still-shot as an effective and reccurring device in the films of Zhang Yimou (movies were the topic of discussion) comes relatively easily at this point, but I had no idea what the names of the tomatoes, peppers, or onions in my noodles were. In middle school Spanish class, we spent a unit on vegetables and fruit and a unit on parts of the body (I still don't know the Mandarin for arm, back, neck, knee, etc.); among my Chinese lessons last year were a unit on crime (whose study-dialogue was the fictional animal abuse trial of a police officer who'd caused his dog to become addicted to cocaine so that it would be better able to sniff out hidden crack) and a unit on education (in which a grad student disillusioned with his study of Confucianism and looking to quit school argued with his advising professor, who was trying to convince him to stay). The conversation with Jenny (her English name: conversely, I'm Xiao Bai now) was interesting, particularly when it was interrupted by a drunk Chinese guy who came up and told me that if he heard me mention Taiwan one more time (I had been talking about how many of my Chinese teachers were Taiwanese, and how we'd spend one week on simplified characters and one week on traditional) he'd kill me.

Apart from the odd boozed-up patriot, Xi'an seems like a really nice city. It's been raining so I haven't seen a whole lot of it, but I spent several hours yesterday wandering through the Muslim quarter, where I found more Kosher-safe food: I downed a plate of lamb-filled water dumplings whose pork equivalents I've been lusting after for years. Today I went to the southern part of the city to see the historical museum, which was pretty impressive. It's really easy to stay in the hostel and chat with the Chinese people, but I guess it's okay, since the staff are all locals so I can justify it as a genuinely interesting cultural experience. (This in sharp contrast to the conversation taking place to my left, in which a drunk Quebecois is explaining the intricacies of geopolitics to a drunk Hollander: "9/11! It could have been done by China! It's my own theory, but it's too complicated to explain.")

Two more days in Xi'an, then back to Beijing to start studying. That was fast...

Kaifeng

2006-07-18T07:30:00.000-07:00

Kaifeng was the capital during the Northern Song Dynasty, but is now a smallish city (by Chinese standards, which means a population of four million or so), with very few buildings over five-ish stories and almost none over 10 (due, via Lonely Planet, to restrictions on buildings with deep foundations, on account of the potential archaeological interest of the ground below). It took about thirty seconds of walking in the street for the city to win me over totally: walking around anywhere else in China, I can count on everyone I pass staring at me; guys who think they're clever shouting "Halloo!" at me; old men and women sitting on the sidewalk muttering about the laowai who's looking around. In Kaifeng, none of that. I might as well have been Chinese for all the attention I got: it's hard to describe what a relaxing experience it was. The city itself is probably representative of Chinese small cities in general: a big agricultural presence, since the city proper is surrounded immediately on all sides by rice/corn/peanut farmland. A lot of the city streets are given over to farmer's markets at all times of the day, and it's not uncommon to see a donkey hitched to a cart of watermelons, munching its way through a heap of corn-husks.

I was in car 13 and compartment 13 on the train from Shanghai to Kaifeng, which caricature of a bad omen didn't really hit me until I ended up with three snoring men as bunkmates. Since nothing brings out homicidal rage in me like being kept awake by the sound of fat Chinese men's nasal blockage, I decided that putting my MP3 player on at full blast would be the slightly preferable option; resulting in my sleeping almost not at all during the 18-hour ride. As a result, I pretty much spent my first day and a half in Kaifeng sleeping.

Kaifeng's big tourist attraction (the tourists mostly being residents of neighboring cities: I saw no evidence to suggest that I wasn't the only foreigner in the city until a group of German backpackers checked in the day before I left) is its night markets: hundreds of stalls spread over several blocks, each with its own set of specialty foods. Most of these are uncomfortably anatomical for my taste, but in the last two days I've eaten:

something stir-fried that looked jellyish and translucent, and ended up being potato starch and onions (this from an Muslim food stall: the daughter of the proprietors wore a heavy dress and head-scarf, and works in Lebanon as a translator);
lamb and onions rolled up between two pancakes and fried in lamb-fat;
a block of black rice with dried fruit stirred in, and soaked in some sort of light rose-sauce (I saw the word for "rose" on the sign, was intrigued, and decided to order whatever it was);
a "fried-cake:" I ate these at least once a day in Shanghai, where they consisted of a big crepe with an egg fried over the surface, plum sauce and hot pepper spread on, cilantro and green onions thrown on that, and then the whole thing rolled around a couple pieces of thin fried dough. The Kaifeng vendors' version was a more elaborate affair, with a few eggs, black sesame, lots of oil, and a whole handful of fry-crackers in the middle. It was big and made me sick.

I bought all of these from Muslim vendors, because they seemed to be the only ones selling anything other than tripe-on-a-stick, squid-on-a-stick, cicadas-on-a-stick, etc. I'm guessing the sudden attentiveness to Kashrut is mostly an excuse not to be too adventurous, since I don't tend to care much in the US beyond an inexplicable revulsion to pork, except for bacon (a set of dietary restrictions shared exactly by my cousin Jeff, who took me out for Japanese food and gelato (gelato!) while I was in Shanghai: we both ignored a bowl of noodles we'd ordered whose broth turned out to be pork-based, but dug into a cold bacon tofu dish).

While eating the potato-starch noodles, I was seated next to a young couple and ended up talking with them for an hour or so. They were both teachers, had been married three months, and according to tradition lived with his parents and grandparents in the countryside east of the city, where the family moved after their compound in the city was bought out in an urban development campaign a few years ago. I mentioned at some point that I was Jewish and had heard that Kaifeng had at some point had a large Jewish population; later that night when I was at my hostel, Li Bin, the husband, called excitedly and told me he'd been asking around and reading up online, had found that the Jewish history was in fact very interesting, and that there was a Jewish widow named Cui Shupin living in a hutong nearby whom we could visit, which we did the next day. It was interesting, and I'll give a fuller account when I'm in Beijing and can get the photos off my camera and the recording off my MP3 player.

Next stop is Xi'an. I have a hard-seater ticket, which should be fun.

Old Shanghai

2006-07-16T00:00:00.000-07:00

Still in Shanghai. I went back to the Old City yesterday with Eric: he was on an errand to buy a bamboo-splitting knife so that he could teach himself learn to make furniture. The Old City is the part of town contained by Renmin Lu and Zhonghua Lu (the circle they form, I'm told, traces the city walls from Shanghai's fishing village days) next to the Huangpu River. It's a difficult scene to describe, and its architecture seems like as good a place as any to start: imagine a narrow street with small one-story stone buildings, maybe with lintels carved in flower patterns in a European style; and then imagine about half of them with a second floor added on in brick or cinderblock; and then imagine a slant-roofed shack on the roof, comprising a third story; and maybe an outhouse made of green plastic corrugation adjoining the main building, roofed by boards and tar-paper thrown over the top. Then picture a layer of plant growth over the whole thing: grapevines growing over laundry wires; loquat trees sprouting from walls; aloes and prickly pears covering rooftops. Based on the European decoration, it seems like the structures' construction must bracket ninety years of Shanghainese history, if not much more.

I found that a walk through the Old City induced the same adreneline rush and extremity of perception I remember feeling during my visits last year (mountains of refrigerators and stacked screenless TV sets; frowning women shelling soybeans in the street; a blindfold three-year-old throwing his arms around my leg as we waded through a game of Blindman's Bluff): it strikes me that this sort of approach to exploring an off-modernized China-- or looking at any new place or thing-- is neither totally honest nor particularly sustainable; but it's weirdly comforting to find that my own emotional response is replicable. Or something.

Eric, by the way, makes an excellent Shanghai-wandering companion. For one, his Chinese is good; for another, our approaches to/interests in touring and traveling seem very similar (he had, for instance, found the Old City and become fascinated with it long before I got to Shanghai). The Huang Shan expedition never took off, largely because of the wind and rain from the typhoon that's in South China right now. I'll be ending my staying in Shanghai at 11:33 PM, when I'll be taking the L102 train to Zhengzhou (the capital of Henan province and home to the Shaolin temple), and then from there to Kaifeng (a Silk Road-era Jewish settlement and old Tang capital), Hua Shan (another of the Sacred Mountains, since I missed Huang Shan), and Xi'an. I'm hoping I'll get as far as Sichuan, but I'm also hoping to spend four days or so in each of a couple smaller cities along the way. We'll see.

Fudan

2006-07-13T17:47:00.000-07:00

Since coming to Shanghai yesterday morning (sharing a sleeper cabin with a grandmother, her 30-ish son, his 2-ish daughter, and an unrelated businessman), I've become acquainted with a remarkable Chinese invention entirely new to me. Picture a narrow Nalgene with a removable screen about a third of the way down. Its use is as follows: you lift the screen, cover the bottom with tea leaves, close the screen, and fill with hot water. Since acquiring one yesterday, I've started to drink huge amounts of the stuff, because you can get three or four thermosfuls out of each serving of a couple dozen tea leaves, and you can get boiling water basically anywhere in the city. It's attractive (because it's clear, you can watch the tea unfold from pellets into full leaves, forming a layer at the bottom) and practical (because the container is small and relatively non-heat-conductive, you can grab and go). I'm a fan.

Something I'd forgotten I liked about Shanghai is that because it's so hot and muggy, the women tend to wear light skirts and dresses made of some diaphanous kind of cloth, usually in peach, purple, paisley, or some combination thereof. Another innovation both attractive and practical, I suppose.

My host in Shanghai is Eric, Chinese study buddy and Berkeley co-op buddy. He's studying at Fudan University on the same scholarship I'll have to BLCU; and if his experience can be trusted, it should be pretty cool. They're putting him up in an old hotel building a couple blocks off campus on a sycamore-lined street, and he's invested in a couple bamboo lawn chairs so that he can do the Chinese old man thing (i.e. sit outside on hot afternoons and eat watermelon, play Chinese chess, and grunt at passers-by). We made use of the lawn chairs last night and spent the evening outdoors with some dorm-mates over tea-candles, soju and beer (Chinese Suntory: $0.30 for 630 mL and very nearly worth it). There were four Koreans present, as well as a German, a Swiss, an Australian, a Quebecois, a native Chinese, and six Americans including three American Chinese; but Mandarin was the only language we all spoke, so we all spoke Mandarin.

If the weather for this weekend looks good, I'll be heading out of Shanghai with Eric and some of his classmeates to Huang Shan on a 10:30 train tnight. As it's a 12-hour train ride in a direction I want to be going anyway (east), I figure I'll head straight on from there to Xi'an, which is another place I've been curious to see: the old Qin capital and the city where the terra cotta warriors live.

Day 1

2006-07-11T21:10:00.000-07:00

The part of Beijing surrounding my university seems kind of blandly big-cityish so far, but this almost certainly an impression that'll change as I get to know the city better. One nice thing about Beijing is that the local dialect is actually Beijing Mandarin, which means that I can understand cabbies, people talking on the street, ticket vendors shouting at me, etc. much better than I was able to in Shanghai.

One of my pre-trip purchaces was a pocket Chinese-English dictionary. I've found that reading it while eating gives me the same sort of mindless pleasure that looking at cereal boxes used to, only it's productive. Today at lunch, for instance, I learned that the Chinese word for breast-stroke is 蛙泳, which more or less translates to "frogstroke."

There was a middle-aged lady behind me in line at the ticket agency who looked like she was trying to work her way ahead of me in line, which I decided on principle I wasn't going to let happen. We ended up at the counter at the same time, but rather than trying to grab the clerk's attention before I could, she ended up translating for me (well, translating from fast Mandarin to slow Mandarin, but helpful). I ended up booking a 7:21 train to Shanghai tonight, where I'll be visiting friends, teachers, cousins, etc. for a few days. In case I go missing, I'll be on the Z7 train, car 14, cabin 36, on the top bunk.

Arrived

2006-07-11T07:33:00.000-07:00

Got to Beijing without much incident. I'm staying overnight in the dorm of my friend Jordan, fellow white Chinese major (formerly) from Berkeley. The Beijing Language and Culture University campus may have the highest concentration of non-Asians in Beijing. Japanese airlines are nice, although the whole experience of spending time above and inside the Tokyo airport reminded me how little sense I have of Japan (if you can judge from an airport). Tomorrow I need to buy a train ticket to Shanghai and try and plan out some meetings there. Alright, I've been awake and traveling for 25 hours, and it's time to hit the sack (er, Jordan's floor).

Avast

2006-07-08T00:23:00.000-07:00

I went to see the "Pirates of the Caribbean" with Tristan and Samara at midnight at the Arlington, which meant we were in line behind three hundred 16-year-old girls in sailor-striped tops and stockings (you think I'm exaggerating...). I had mixed feelings about it. I think a lot of what I liked in the first movie was the tongue-in-cheek preoccupation with the internal logic of its world: somehow the way the whole plot was driven by things like the Pirate's Code or the intricacies of the curse made the movie very appealing to me. The second movie seemed similarly silly in having a sense of humor deriving largely from its characters' adherance to or rebellion against the constraints of a genre world (Will and Elizabeth shouting "Captain!" at the beginning; the theological deliberations of the short pirate and the one with the wooden eye); but the whole thing seemed in general more haphazard than the first, which may be why I wasn't quite as impressed. Below is the illustration for the Daily Cal review of the movie:

(It's a little faulty: Capt. Jack should have dreadlocks. Oops.)

Scannered

2006-07-05T21:27:00.000-07:00

Illustration for the review of A Scanner Darkly in tomorrow's Daily Cal.

Preface

2006-07-02T23:43:00.000-07:00

Since mid-spring of freshman year, I've had a broadsheet of Chinese calligraphy hanging on my wall. The details of my acquisition of this particular sheet (I took it down off a public bulletin board in an ambiguous act of petty theft, where I assume some calligraphy student had posted it in celebration of the Chinese New Year) are less interesting than its personal significance as an artifact of the three-odd months that were most formative to my interest in Chinese language and culture. I find that I can, with some accuracy, track my Chinese language ability through the ways I've understood the calligraphy through time: during freshman year, it struck me as beautiful, but I couldn't so much as imagine that meaning could be extracted from it; during sophomore year, I was able to read bits and pieces, and would copy simple characters as I learned them in class to practice handwriting; during junior year, I was able to see the grammatical characters I was learning in Classical Chinese class and thereby discern some of the structure of the piece (the original, like all original Classical texts, has no punctuation). It occurred to me this week that it would be easy to put a line or two into a search engine and find out what it was and what it said.

I did, and the text turned out to be the "Preface to the Orchid Pavilion Collection," written in the year 353. The "Collection" is of poems written by the forty-two scholars in attendance at a literary gathering in Zhejiang province; and its preface, written by Wang Xizhi, became known as the single greatest work of Chinese calligraphy in history (this would seem to be the basis for its having been copied and posted around the Berkeley campus: many of the cursive character forms on my sheet are idiosyncratic, but they match copies of the original I was able to find on the web).

Below are the original text and two translations. The first is somewhat literal with respect to the sentence structure; the second is freer. It's hard not to find it moving, particularly the last third or so.

永和九年，歲在癸丑，暮春之初，會于會稽山陰之蘭亭，修禊事也。群賢畢至，少長咸集。此地有崇山峻嶺，茂林修竹；又有清流激湍，映帶左右，引以為流觴曲水，列坐其次。雖無絲竹管弦之盛，一觴一詠，亦足以暢敘幽情。

是日也，天朗氣清，惠風和暢，仰觀宇宙之大，俯察品類之盛，所以游目騁懷，足以極視聽之娛，信可樂也。

夫人之相與，俯仰一世，或取諸懷抱，晤言一室之內；或因寄所托，放浪形骸之外。雖取舍萬殊，靜躁不同，當其欣于所遇，暫得于己，快然自足，不知老之將至。及其所之既倦，情隨事遷，感慨系之矣。向之所欣，俯仰之間，已為陳跡，猶不能不以之興懷。況修短隨化，終期于盡。古人雲﹕“死生亦大矣。”豈不痛哉！

每覽昔人興感之由，若合一契，未嘗不臨文嗟悼，不能喻之于懷。固知一死生為虛誕，齊彭殤為妄作。後之視今，亦猶今之視昔。

悲夫！故列敘時人，錄其所述，雖世殊事異，所以興懷，其致一也。後之覽者，亦將有感于斯文。

...

In the ninth year of the reign of the Emperor Mu of Jin, which was the year of the Ox, at the beginning of March, we all gathered at the orchid pavilion in Shanyin County, Guiji Prefecture, for the Spring Purification Festival. All of the prominent people were there, from old to young. This was an area of high mountains and lofty peaks, with an exuberant growth of trees and bamboos, which also had clear rushing water, which reflected the sunlight as it flowed past either side of the pavilion. The pavilion divided the flowing water into two winding brooks, and all the guests were sitting side by side. Although we lacked the boisterousness of a live orchestra, with a cup of wine here and a reciting of poetry there, it was sufficient to allow for a pleasant exchange of cordial conversations. On this particular day, the sky was bright and the air was clear, with a gentle breeze which was blowing freely. When looking up, one could see the vastness of the heavens, and when looking down, one could observe the abundance of things. The contentment of allowing one’s eyes to wander was enough to reach the heights of delight for the sight and sound. What joy.

Now all people live in this world together: some will take all of their aspirations, and share them in private with a friend; still others will abandon themselves to reckless pursuits. Even though everyone makes different choices in life, some thoughtful and some rash; when a person meets with joy, he will temporarily be pleased, and will feel content, but he is not mindful that old age will soon overtake him. Wait until that person becomes weary, or has a change of heart about something, and will thus be filled with regrets. The happiness of the past, in the blink of eye, will have already become a distant memory, and this cannot but cause one to sigh; in any case, the length of a man’s life is determined by the Creator, and we will all turn to dust in the end. The ancients have said, “Birth and Death are both momentous occasions.” Isn’t that sad!

Every time I consider the reasons for why the people of old had regrets, I am always moved to sadness by their writings, and I can not explain why I am saddened. I most certainly know that it is false and absurd to treat life and death as one and the same, and it is equally absurd to think of dying at an old age as being the same as dying at a young age. When future generations look back to my time, it will probably be similar to how I now think of the past. What a shame! Therefore, when I list out the people that were here, and record their musings, even though times and circumstances will change, as for the things that we regret, they are the same. For the people who read this in future generations, perhaps you will likewise be moved by my words.

tr. A Cai (source)

...

This is the ninth year of Yonghe; Guichou in cycle. We met in late spring at the Orchid Pavilion in Shanyin to celebrate the Water Festival.

All the scholar friends are gathered, and there is a goodly mixture of old and young. In the background lie high peaks and deep forests; while a clear, gurgling brook catches the light to the right and to the left. We then arrange ourselves, sitting on its bank, drinking in succession from the goblet as it floats down the stream. No music is provided, but with drinking and with song, our hearts are gay and at ease. It is a clear spring day with a mild, caressing breeze. The vast universe, throbbing with life, lies spread before us, entertaining the eye and pleasing the spirit and all the senses. It is perfect.

Now when men come together, they let their thoughts travel to the present. Some enjoy a quiet conversation indoors; and others play about outdoors, occupied with what they love. The forms of anouement differ according to temperaments, but when each has found what he wants, he is happy and never feels old. Then as time passes on and one is tired of his pursuits, it seems that what fascinated him not so long ago has become a mere memory. What a thought! Besides, whether individually we live a long life or not, we all return to nothingness. The ancient regarded death as the great question. Is it not sad to think of it?

I often thought that the people of the past lived and felt exactly as we of today. Whenever I read their writing, I felt this way and was seized with its pathos. It is cool comfort to say that life and death are different phases of the same thing and that a long span of life or a short one does not matter. Alas! The people of the furture will look upon us as we look upon those who have gone before us. Hence I have recorded here those present and what they said. Ages may pass and times may change,but the human sentiments will be the same; I know that future readers who set their eyes upon these words will be affected in the same way.

(source)

Travel update: at this point, I am in possession of a plane ticket and a passport with a colorful visa that takes up a whole page; which is, in some basic sense, all I need to go to China. Unless you count a case of Immodium as a basic need, which on second thought I suppose I do.

Hi.

2006-06-17T15:10:00.000-07:00

This is a journal I'll be keeping during my upcoming trip to China, where I'll be studying Mandarin at Beijing Language and Culture University on a scholarship from the China National Office for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language. I moved a couple China posts from last summer over from the old Livejournal, but this is really the first post here.

I went to the San Francisco Consulate today to apply for a visa. Because I'm paranoid about things like this, I got up two hours early, made three copies of all the necessary forms, and had four prints made of my photo. As it turned out, I was in and out of the visa office in under 15 minutes, five of which were spent talking to a chatty clerk wearing a pink shirt that said "Love"; and I also got three spare copies of my passport photo out of the bargain. A scan of one of these seemed like as good an image as any to christen this blog:

Further bulletins as events warrent...

Pieces of Shanghai

2005-07-18T06:20:00.000-07:00

When you hear about the ease with which pirated DVDs can be obtained in China, what that means practically is that every convenience store, restaurant, newsstand, and boba vendor has somebody outside with a few bins of movies in plastic wrap, each with a misspelled title, the lead actor's face pasted over by Angelina Jolie's on the cover, and a movie summary on the back that's been through about twenty Babelfish translations. They all have a dozen copies of this season's and last seasons big hits, but beyond that, they tend to specialize-- one vendor nearby deals almost exclusively in slasher films, while another has bad fantasy (Merlin, Labyrinth, the Dinotopia miniseries, etc.). I passed a vendor on Jiaotong Lu who had several copies of "The Triumph of the Will" (which I've been curious about, and bought).

..

I've been finding that idiomatic English is a bizarre sort of commodity here. There are TV ads playing constantly in the subway stations featuring a youngish guy who introduces himself as Wu Da-something and proceeds for forty seconds to explain (in Chinese) a few colloqialisms against an appropriate background. He sits on a big boulder as he talks about "let's rock and roll!", "between a rock and a hard place," and "I got rocked," and walks around a baseball field to explain "curveball," "home run," and "home court" (the last of which, it occurs to me, doesn't really fit; maybe you need to pay for the program (http://www.talkdatalk.com -- I guess the fact that I can remember that means it's effective advertising) in order to learn the basketball slang).

Idiomatic Chinese is interesting. There's a class of Chinese phrases called chengyu (成 cheng has to do with the idea of completion, and I've heard the name translated "set phrases"). The example that every Chinese TA likes to give is 自相矛盾 zixiang maodun, 自 is a reflexive, 相 has to do with "mutually" or "against," and 矛 and 盾 mean "spear" and "shield" respectively. Idiomatically, this means "self-contridictory:" the saying has to do with the story of a weapons-vendor in a marketplace with a crowd gathered around him, talking about how his spears are the sharpest in the world and that they can pierce anything; and how his shields are the strongest in the world, and nothing can pierce them. Somebody asks him what happens when he tries to pierce the world's strongest shield with the world's stongest spear; he stammers, drops his wares, and bolts. So far, this is the same as any English saying like "putting the cart before the horse;" the difference is the place the sayings have in the language: 自相矛盾 isn't an aphorism, it's an adjective, the obvious way to talk about something self-contradictory; to say that you're conflicted about something, you'd say wo hen maodun, I'm spear-and-shield. There are hundreds of chengyu, and from what I can tell, a thorough command of them is a mark of good writing.

..

I went to the Old City yesterday. These are things I wrote down in my notepad as I was walking:

Old men flying kites from the street corner-- one wearing white flannel, one wearing shorts and no shirt-- the kites attached to something that looks like it works like a fishing reel, because it's clicking as one of the men draws string in.

An uneven ceiling fan over an empty table that should have street food or shoes for sale on it-- one of the two blades is higher than the other, and it has an irregular wobble. There is a bedspread patterened with the Tasmanian Devil shading the stand.

Hens pecking at watermelon skins in the drain-- the skins leathery on account of the heat-- and at heaps of bones and soybean shells. Nearby there are mannequins with mismatched hands modelling beehive wigs and red and pink jumpsuits, breasts tremendous and terrifyingly pert.

An abandoned-looking building held up by bamboo construction framing-- the ceiling is very low, and there is a ladder going up into a trapdoor just inside the front door-- I push it up a little bit and see an old man standing over it, chopping fish and glaring down.

..

I brought Justine along, and am about forty pages from the end. It ocurred to me that reading it this past week has had a big part in shaping how I've seen things: that is, if I were reading "River Town" instead, or if "Lost in Translation" were on my mind (these being the first two stories that come to mind that paint people seeing new places with distinct moods), I would certainly be seeing very different things while walking around the city, or be looking for different things, or be prepared to see things differently. It's a small epiphany as epiphanies go, and it probably won't be long before I think of it with the same grimace that 9th grade's Wow! All those people walking on the street are people, with thoughts and dreams and neuroses of their own! brings to my face now, but it seemed worth recording, and probably goes a long way towards explaining why the Old Town observations above are mannered in the particular way they are.

Bathroom wall sociology

2005-07-06T21:49:00.000-07:00

I should be updating and emailing more, but internet access is harder to get at the university than it was in Yangshuo. Just so you know, there's a reason.

While I was in a McDonald's bathroom on Fuzhou Lu (because the foreign language bookstore didn't have one; Chinese attempts at American food are invariably expensive and disappointing, and I wasn't going to pay to see if McDonald's broke the rule), I saw the following text on a poster above the urinal I was using:

一个黑人青年在纽约一家餐馆用餐。他点了一只烤鸡刚要吃时，门口冲进来两名3K党成员并冲他吼到：“嘿嘿! 黑鬼，你怎样对待这只烤鸡我们就怎样对待你!!” 黑人青年愣了片刻，随即拿起烤鸡并在鸡屁股上亲了一口。

Ronald McDonald was grinning and pointing at the text in two places on the page; that and the bubbly font said that it was a joke. I couldn't read much of it-- the grammar is more formal than I'm used to reading, which means that a lot of the words and sentence structures I know were replaced by higher-register equivalents-- but what I could make out of the first sentence looked like, "A young black man was in a restaurant in New York..." I was intrigued, so I took the poster down and put it in my backpack, then went over it later with a dictionary. This is the result:

A young black man was in a restaurant in New York. He had ordered a roast chicken and was about to eat it, when two members of the KKK party burst through the door and shouted in his face: "Hey, ni*ger! [the Chinese word here means "black ghost," and is the equivalent racial epithet] We're going to treat you the way you treat that roast chicken!" The young black man paused for a moment, and then took the chicken and kissed its ass.

You can make what you will of the fact that this joke appears a.) in Shanghai; and b.) in a McDonald's bathroom in Shanghai; anything I could say would be the same amateur sociology that anyone else could come up with. It's worth noting, though, that the "党" in "两名3K党成员" ("two members of the KKK party") is the same word used for formal political parties-- Democratic, Republican, Communist, etc. Knowing what the "3K党" is and does seems pretty important to the joke; that the average McDonald's bathroom-goer would be expected to know these things probably has something to do with the fact that almost any Chinese you talk to has the impression that America is generally a pretty racist place (this usually comes up fourth or so on the list)-- if the Chinese language TV news here is anything like the official English language TV news, it doesn't do anything to blunt that impression. Whatever, it's funny.

My program is up and running, which means that I'm living with a Korean pre-law type named Simon and spending four hours or so a day in class. My routine for the rest of the day tends to be to eat three vegetable dumplings on the way to the subway station, get off the train at a random stop, and walk around till it starts raining, at which point I go back to the dorms and watch a pirated DVD with some of the other EAP people. I'll write again when I have some more stories.

In Yangshuo

2005-06-20T22:48:00.000-07:00

After a Boeing 737 and two buses, I got into Yangshuo yesterday afternoon. I spent yesterday evening and a lot of today walking around the town, which is fairly big, probably several tens of thousands. It's monsoon season here, and so tourists are either staying inside or else getting very wet, which is how I spent the part of this afternoon that I spent climbing one of the hundreds of high limestone peaks around the town. It was 1,220 black stone steps to the top, give or take. The view was mostly of clouds and fog, but the trail itself was beautiful-- bamboo and sharp-edged grass, and dragonflies, and two Qing dynasty tombs.

The first surprise that the scenery offered was that all those Chinese watercolor paintings everybody has seen-- high cliffs and low rivers fading off into the fog-- those paintings exaggerate almost not at all. Somehow the landscape seems perfectly matched to the art it inspired: late this afternoon the rain cleared up for a bit, and looking out of town, I could see bits of cloud clinging to a high cliff nearby. The bits of cloud were white and the color of the sky behind was not much different, but a little bluer and a little darker, so that the effect was of a halo around that part of the mountain. Later, after I ate dinner, I went walking through the park in the middle of town to the other side, and went as far as I could down the road till it left town. Off to the left of the road was a large pool several hundred meters across that belonged to one of the several small rivers that go through Yangshuo into the larger 漓 Li river. The surface of the pool was covered in lotus leaves, and there was a twilight mist gathered over the water. Somehow what I've seen of Chinese poetry seems perfectly suited to this landscape: terse lines of verse that name the thing or the emotion rather than describing it seem somehow like the only possible reaction to a landscape like that (this is fallacious for all sorts of reasons-- I've never read Chinese poetry in any depth, for one; for another, as fas as I can tell, terseness was a matter of language as much as of style-- but you can take this for whatever you think it's worth).

Food: I ate Chinese pastries for breakfast, which I think are like carob and lychees in that you need to be brought up with them to like them. They're a little too bready and sweet for my taste. There's a huge night-market near the bus-station that I haven't tried yet because I'm always full by the time I think of it. A night market is a big group of food vendors, each with all his ingredients out on the table-- several kinds of meat, vegetables, noodles, fish, snails, eels, frogs, etc.-- who will then cook whatever you tell him you want. So far I've eaten two meals further down on the same street, in an open off-street store where the same two women make stir-fry meals all day. The tables are very low, and have fans which have an annoying way of cooling off the food before it should be cooled off.

In almost all of this province, where mountains and water aren't is farmland and villages (where, I read, 75% of the China's population lives, and therefore 12-odd percent of the world's population). I'm going to rent a bike tomorrow and look around. I may go out for a couple days and see what it looks like further out. Just in case: I'll (maybe) be leaving on the road that goes out of the public park, and I'll bring my cell phone and leave the locater on.