When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush

Nothing is so beautiful as spring --says Gerard Manley Hopkins, and who can't agree? Beibei is alive--the high rock walls are again covered with a profusion of green, with threads of wild roses and other blossoming things mixed in. Hillside orchards lift cherry scent and rafters covering granite tables in public areas drip with wisteria. There's still plenty of dirt and pollution, but the earth's natural rhythms push spectacularly through the grime and honking horns.

It was actually the first day of spring when some students from last semester invited me to go down to the Jialing River and fly kites. As happens in spring, the skies shifted gears and threatened rain instead, but we still enjoyed a dramatic afternoon.

But spring is also alive with quickening human hearts and--it is with great joy that I will go celebrate  young love halfway around the globe and, with my beloveds, witness Chris and Ana's marriage. I will get to see Ben, Nick, and other dear ones. Not all--in fact, few of my siblings and special friends will be able to go to the Dominican Republic for this wedding, halfway between Chris's US and Ana's Brazilian home ground. Tai gui le!  I'm grateful, though, that I will be able to go--and welcome Ana to our family.

Dr. Ana Gleisner is on the right (taken in 2011).

Ana and Chris - first trip to Brazil.

We don't really need Alfred Lord Tennyson to remind us that "In the spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love."

Did you ever like mammograms?

In the middle ages, they tortured people by stretching them out on the rack; in the new millennium, they do the opposite, compress body parts that are still attached between plates of glass. Imagine placing your nose in a vice, and just having it squeezed until it was one flat  piece of tissue that could fit into an envelope and be mailed somewhere, or perhaps your ear. Your ear is probably already flat, but, because it's attached to your head, you'd have to tilt your head in some odd positions to accommodate having that ear squeezed between two glass plates without having your brain X-rayed. So it is with breasts when getting a mammogram.

In that hospital in Chengdu, I got to freeze as if I were a dancer in a modern ballet, with my chin thrust way behind my shoulder, a shoulder that would be curled forward in one direction, while an arm was flung out dramatically in another. And then I'd change positions into another dramatically unnatural pose and let them take  more pictures.

Now, in theory I'm a great fan of mammograms, for they have saved many a dear friend's life by detecting their cancer at an early stage, including the cancer of my Belgian buddy Inge who was tagging along with me to Chengdu (partly to check out the pandas). But in practice, I've never been thrilled to contort myself in the various positions required to get any kind of image from a woman built like me. To say that I am not big-breasted is a masterpiece of understatement.

So, you should imagine the efforts of the Chinese technicians trying to rearrange my resistant body to place things just right on the glass plates before they came crushing down. Of course, they'd almost have me man-handled the right way and would order me to move in some little direction that--well, my Hanyu just isn't that good. Wo ting bu dong. I'd still be in the wrong position.

It was silly to be embarrassed by all this because there's no place for embarrassment in Chinese medical practices. You're about to get a mammogram? Just drop your shirt, right there. No gowns, no privacy. The door's ajar? It's so busy in the hall nobody's paying any attention. Not fussing about privacy is no doubt more efficient and--it's not like the doctors and medical staff don't see everything anyway.

(Back story: What they were doing was just routine follow-up that the excellent Peace Corps medical staff had ordered. I had some routine and not so routine health issues looked into, which required taking the train to Chengdu for an overnight and then being accompanied by a Peace Corps doctor to the hospitals--yes, plural--where the various procedures were done.)

Crowds of people waited in waiting rooms, including monks in orange and maroon robes, perhaps even more conspicuous than I was. I was actually accompanied by two doctors: my friend Inge as well as the youngest Peace Corps doctor, a beautiful woman with black hair streaming down her back, almost to her tiny blue jeans. She was most appropriately named Dr. Bing (sick) and could maneuver crowds and bureaucracy like a maverick.

Several specialists gave me undivided attention in a few subsequent exams, greatly impressing Inge.  Although I was seeing Western-trained physicians with excellent credentials, most of them either practice or are open (selectively) to Eastern traditions, too.  I will save for another time more discussion about that. I suspect we, the East and the West, have much to learn from each other's medical systems.

Girls' Day--really?

I wasn’t surprised the first time I heard someone say “Happy Women’s Day” a week ago Friday, and I wasn’t too surprised when my very charming language teacher laughed and told a small group of Koreans, Japanese, Russians, a few Americans, and a Frenchman that, in so many words, Women’s Day was the official holiday but the unofficial holiday was “Girl’s Day.” In fact, I wasn’t surprised at all. For a semester, I’d heard college students calling themselves “girls” and had witnessed little animal ears on various hats and cell phone covers.  Other things seemed “girl-ish” indeed, even though being girl-ish one minute didn’t preclude walking arm-in-arm in tight mini-skirts and stiletto heels the next. But what I had naively failed to realize was that International Women’s Day is a bona fide stay-home-from-work holiday, not only in China but in many countries—and had been an official holiday in China since the founding of the PCR in 1949. That was roughly a generation before the UN proclaimed Women’s Day for women’s rights and world peace in 1977.

 But many of the students at my college and elsewhere have been actively plotting an alternative celebration, “Girl’s Day,” something more akin to Valentine’s Day than any sort of politically grounded event. One of my students wrote to tell me that the Student Union of the School of Computer Science had announced a set of “rules” for Girl’s day. He wrote that “on the girls' day, a boy on a bicycle should take the girl who is walking beside, boys shouldn’t reject a dinner treat request from girls, boys are not allowed to retort girls even if they quarrel, boys should allow girls jumping queues, a boy shouldn’t refuse the love if a girl confess love to the boy.”  Chivalry is not dead!

  

I think I hear Susan B. Anthony groaning.

I look at those shoes and think about bound feet—what are they thinking? Who are they pleasing?

Strangely, I’ve begun to see these most a-political of acts—dressing in the most provocative and anti-feminist ways—as almost political. Not political, but rather  willful resistance to botched deliveries of the political. Thinking this way helps me understand both my Chinese students and my students at home, who also tend to be relatively a-political.   Watching Zhang’s 1994 film To Live last night led me to reflect once again on what it takes to live in a world where political movements with good intentions can go—and have gone—tragically awry. What does it mean to live anywhere—whatever the internal and external conditions are? 

The historical meaning of Women’s Day, I’m sure, is not lost on my students. And they do have a sense of irony. They, both men and women, could laugh heartily when reading “The Good Wife’s Guide,” an article (dubiously) attributed to a 1950s issue of Good Housekeeping:
*Have dinner ready. Plan ahead, even the night before, to have a delicious meal ready, and on time, for his return. This is a way of letting him know you have been thinking about him and are concerned about his needs. Most men are hungry when they come home and the prospect of a good meal (especially his favorite dish) is part of the warm welcome needed. . . .
* Arrange his pillow and offer to take off his shoes. Speak in a low, soothing and pleasant voice.
* Don't ask him questions about his actions or question his judgement, or integrity. Remember he is the master of the house, and as such will always exercise his will with fairness and truthfulness. You have no right to question him.
* A good wife always knows her place.

 I’m reminded, too, that translation continues to be a devilish problem. So, what is a woman? 女人  女子  妇女   妇女  妇 And what is a girl? 女孩   姑娘  的女孩  女 的姑娘  Not so easy. Is it my notion of “woman” the same thing that Chinese “girls” are resisting when they seek an alternative holiday celebrating young, pretty, unmarried women under thirty? Whew. Sometimes it’s amazing that we can communicate at all.

 

 

--> But, even if it’s true that, paradoxically, (political) resistance to botched political activity may be expressed in pointedly a-political ways, I don’t see all bygone political activity as botched and I hope that some day my students (Chinese, American, whatever) may appreciate more fully the founding of the International Women’s Day.

What's 55 + 1?

One. According to Thomas Mullaney,  the math works this way in China: 55 + 1 = 1. That is, 55 ethnic minorities plus one Han ethnic group equals one, the People's Republic of China. The Chinese language is "Hanyu"; the Chinese dominant identity is Han. Putting aside the question of the dominant "1," Mullaney asks just where did the widely accepted number "55" come from? Who decided what an ethnic group in China is and then counted them--using what criteria? Was it a unique language that defined the ethnic group? A unique culture? A period of cultural dominance? Unique foods?

Song Tao's snapshot of a Dai parsley dish

Well, it was food that was on Song Tao's mind (and mine) when we got lost looking for a particular Dai restaurant in Kunming. The moon rose in another clear Yunnan night sky, we walked and talked, and got lost. But, by the time we found the Dai restaurant, not too far from Yunnan University, the crowd was thinning and we decided the timing was perfect. So, is it true that Dai cuisine specializes in bugs? And moss? And so forth?

It's fortunate that we had heard such rave reviews about this restaurant about the size of a double car garage with the door wide open, because the menu might not have tempted us otherwise. The colorful menu listed this fare. . .

          Acid Sweet Yuanzi
          Clear Soup Pig's Knuckles
          Brain in Soy Sauce Pig's Knuckles
          Old Fried Chicken to Let Them Know
          Acanthropanax Spicy Microphones
          Water Pickles Mix Big Fire
          Cold Pigskin
          Dai Fried Cowhide
          Cold Eggplant
          Cold Gray Eggs
          Smelly Food Fried Egg
          Sauce Blasting Eggplant

Now, were the cooks wanting to pack up early and go home? Or were they serious about trying to tempt us to eat something? Somehow, we were tempted, even if not by the menu itself. We ordered pineapple rice, a phenomenal tofu dish wrapped in greens, sensational fried moss, and a Dai water parsley dish that had some of my favorite sweet and sour (lemony) flavors. The food was exquisitely memorable--and you can fill up on a lot of moss without overeating.

Song Tao's shapshot of fried river moss

The Dai are perhaps not a single ethnic people but rather several groups with different languages and cultures, some millennia old, extending through Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia. So, it might be a gross generalization to say that the Dai are a nominally Buddhist people who grow rice, sugar cane, and bananas in the fertile river basins of the Mekong and other southeast Asian rivers. It might not be true that most Dai men are tattoed with tigers and most married Dai women wear silver wristbands and wear their hair up with combs and flowers. Perhaps they don't all live in bamboo houses raised on stilts. And perhaps they (and other ethnic minorities) are not underrepresented in Chinese affairs; perhaps they are not overrepresented among people lacking sufficient food and water.

Whoever the Dai people are, I don't think their presence is the primary reason I liked  Kunming--perhaps it was just being far away from the intense commercialism and pace of the east coast; perhaps it was being in a place where diversity is the norm; perhaps it was being in a place where old women's faces crinkle with smiles instead of stiff stares. Who knows?

But two things are for sure--one, I don't really know what makes a Shaoshu Minzu or minority group, especially the Dai, (or what the differences are between and among nationality, language, culture, and ethnicity) and, two, I do know that I had an incredibly nutritious and tasty Dai dinner.

Song Tao's snapshot of Dai tofu wrapped in bamboo

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Mullaney, Thomas S. “Introduction : 55 + 1 = 1 or the Strange Calculus of Chinese Nationhood.” China Information 2004 18: 197      http://cin.sagepub.com/content/18/2/197