Settling In
August 26th, 2008
It is just now 1pm on Tuesday August 26th, and I’m sitting at the desk in my room on the tenth floor of the Guangxi Normal University’s International Student dormitory. My computer’s clock tells me that it is 10pm in Seattle, Monday August 25th. I’ve been in Guilin, Guangxi Province for twenty-four hours, China for two days. I am in Guilin as a student and as a teaching assistant for my Chinese professor from last year at the UW. I had already signed up for this exploration seminar as a student when she asked me if I’d like to be her assistant. Among my duties, the first included making sure the seventeen students traveling to Guilin on the 23rd all arrived safely. While here, I will be in charge of writing the seminar’s “official” blog and for photographing our daily life and outings. I am also going to help Yu Laoshi (“teacher”, pronounced LAO-SHUR) translate the cultural lectures that we have each week.
We are supposed to keep a separate, personal journal of our experiences while here and so I’ve dusted the cobwebs from this blog, which became so familiar to me and some of you just a couple of years ago (!!!).
Before I backtrack and record some of the feelings of returning to China after my year here, I want to describe my month-long home and its surroundings. As I look through the window to my right just now, I see the compound that is this University stretching not too far until large mounds of tree-covered earth rise out of a low mist. I am on the tenth floor and so the view is a vast one. This city of Guilin has a population of approximately 1.5 million and the city was built within these incredible land formations.
It has been raining since some time late last night and just stopped less than twenty minutes ago. The mounds, some small and others mildly daunting mountains, are as numerous as the clouds. When I woke this morning, in fact, I couldn’t tell which were earth and which were sky as my eyes searched the horizon. Even now there is a thick, low fog cutting some of these curious shapes in half. I am fascinated with them and have taken photo after photo, since they change as often as the light changes during the day.
We will visit several of the larger of these mounds, the Chinese name of which I must learn so that I can stop calling them “shape”, “mound”, “formation”, etc. They’ve been a staple of Chinese poetry, calligraphy and art for millennia and therefore deserve to be called by their given name. I grasp for appropriate words that don’t do them justice for I’ve never come across a terrain such as this in my life. Surely, were you to see them too, you’d be driven mad or driven to write poems to them or climb them in order to drink wine atop their backs during a moonlit night. Barring any further exhaustion from jetlag, these are just the things I will do in order to pay homage to this curious city and its ancient “sky-scrapers”.
Speaking of jetlag…We arrived in Beijing after the 10-12 (it was never clear and I didn’t keep a close watch on my, er, watch) hour direct flight from Seattle. It was Sunday evening and the last day of the Olympics. We were met at the airport by a woman in charge of International Exchange programs at a UW sister University. She herded us to a large bus and once we were all inside, she told us that originally her University’s dorm was to host us. However, her University had been picked to host the Beach Volleyball competitions and so the dormitories were full of Olympics athletes and such. She had managed to procure us rooms at the “Yunnan Province Leadership Hosting Dormitory”. Apparently this is a compound with a hotel that houses leaders from Yunnan Province when they visit the capital. We were the only visitors Sunday evening and had the compound to ourselves. As we drove the forty minutes from the airport to the dormitory, we were told that there was a curfew due to the closing ceremonies and that it would be best if we stayed put once we arrived at the hotel. This ended up not being a choice since there were two gates to the compound and both were shut tight once we arrived. The drive from the airport to the hotel, although long, afforded not one view of the “Bird’s Nest” or the “Aquatic Center Cube”, though we did catch a glimpse of the crazy building that looks like an engineer’s square up-ended. I wasn’t able to snap a photograph fast enough (perhaps because my camera was in my backpack, which was on the floor?) but we’ve been told we will tour some of Beijing’s latest architectural wonders at the end of our month in Guilin. The streets were eerily empty, for China or any other country for that matter, which makes it even more eerie given China’s love for being out in the streets in the evening.
I’m listening to some music (Italian folk music from Alan Lomax’s collection – I like the insane contrast of music to surroundings) very lightly right now, and above the music I hear the cacophony of crickets in the wet grasses down below in the fields beyond the University’s buildings. Last night I turned my air conditioner off and opened the windows to the rain and heat – it is hot, but it feels so good, the moisture and the wet heat – and frogs sang me to sleep. There are also the many noises of life outside, far below. Children’s laughter and occasional crying, the beeps and screeching of badly tuned brakes on bicycles and scooters. There aren’t sirens or car noises within the University though, which makes for an unusually quiet atmosphere – one of the huge differences between this experience and my former memories of China.
So we arrived at our Beijing hotel, were given rooms and taken to a dining hall for dinner. The food reminded me of the food in Anji, outside Shanghai, when I stayed at the “3 Star” hotel with Angeline and got deathly, deathly ill. That food, and this food weren’t so obviously bad; it was just that there was something “off” about them. As if prepared without love or care and therefore had no chance at giving sustenance. I ate little that night, partly because of the premonition that the food wouldn’t sit well and partly because we’d been stuffed full of airplane food the whole flight. I hadn’t even had the last meal served and still I was extremely full from their various snacks. A migrane started to form behind my eyes an hour before we landed and so by the time dinner was over, I was dreaming of lying down and passing out for a good ten hours. We returned to our rooms around seven thirty and while my roommate Michelle (Her Chinese name is Chen Min Yi) showered, I flipped through the ten channels of television looking for the closing ceremonies. All ten channels had Olympics coverage of some kind and so I had a chance to try out my listening skills and learn a little about China’s methods of covering the Olympics. As far as I know, the United States only has two channels at the most dedicated to Olympics coverage, and maybe only one that covers the games all day long. Not so in China. But is this at all surprising? I watched an expose on the young men who would be wearing those crazy leg extensions that allow them to bounce and do flips and jump really high. Several citizens were interviewed about the leg extensions themselves and some said they thought all people should wear them all the time, others thought they were a little strange but made for exciting “capers”…Michelle finished her toilette and then Ray (Ming Cai) and Josh (Hao Jiu Hua) joined us for the ceremonies. We all managed to watch the opening parts – the women wearing the LED color-changing dresses with all the bells attached to them, the bicycle helmet-wearing drummers, the leg-extension jumpers, the sprocket riders, etc., but when the “parade of countries” began, we all looked at each other and within seconds had said goodnight and were in bed ready for sleep. Michelle and I knew better and turned the television and lights off and fell asleep without light or noise to wake us up later. Josh and Ray returned to their room where they turned the television on and fell asleep with lights and television on and their door open. We were all very tired.
