Gratitude

No turkey day here . . . and no turkeys, although free-range chickens appear out of nowhere all over the city. On campus, by the bus stop, at the foot of my apartment, and none of them seem to care that they look out of place.

Frankly, I don't miss turkey at all.

But I do miss my people, and I'm moved to express gratitude for so many special people in my life. One of the most articulate spokespersons for gratitude in my family is this one (who, when this photo was taken, had just treated himself to a haircut) . . .

And these are ones I also miss sorely . . .

I'm grateful for Patton sons, Davis sibs, as well as far-flung family in New Zealand, the UK and Czech Republic. . . for my CWP colleagues who became lifelong friends and my LSSP buddies and colleagues in the English department . . . for Peace Studies and Peace Corps cohorts and AI student activists, and more.  Jane. UU. Oakland buddies. Book Club. China has given me many new friends and colleagues, but I want to give a special thanks to friends and family back home. I'm grateful for dogwood days in the Ozarks, for all those family dinners at 1753 Trenton Drive and 10 Middlebury Lane, for the 605 South Fifth Street gang and for the Other Mother who has always been the better half of my working brain. As only she will understand, thank you Neila.

Special thanks to Mary, Jim, Ann, David, Ted, and Cathy for coming to visit me in China.

And thanks to every writing teacher I've ever known, Miriam especially . . . I've never thanked you enough for all those hours you've invested in creating novel assignments and for the hundreds and hundreds of hours you've spent thoughtfully responding to your students. John. Hak. And special thanks to those who have ever taken on directing a writing program . . . Marty, Jo Ann, Amy, Donna, Doug, Howard, and others. Cheryl and Dana.

Xie xie!

Dragon Eyes, Cloud Ear Fungus and Such

Dragon Eyes, Cloud Ear Fungus, White Rot, and so on . . .don't let these colorful phrases scare you off! The Chinese tend to give all kinds of things interesting names--not just their fruit (including Dragon Eyes) and mushrooms (including Cloud Ear Fungus and White Rot).

Dragon Eyes - Longan - just about eyeball size

But let me back up to some confusion last week when Olga, Keri Ann and I went to a restaurant that served us some delicious eggplant, potato, and mushroom dishes. We ordered the mushroom dish first, asking for "mogu" and being told they didn't have any "mogu." We were so disappointed. We had our hearts set on the mushroom dish. But the restaurant refrigerator stood an arm's length away from our little table, and we could see a plastic bucket through the glass door that contained something that looked like mushrooms. Ah! Those! Yes! We could have a dish with those, but those were not "mogu." So, when I later asked my tutor Xiaodan to explain why the waiter didn't understand "mogu," I learned that there are scores of names for mushrooms, and "mogu" is only one kind--even if that's the word most Chinese dictionaries give for mushrooms in general.

As Xiaodan and I talked, we started exploring the pictures and names of the various kinds of mushrooms I've been eating for a year and a half (pictures to follow)--but one thing led to another and we found ourselves viewing Xiaodan's favorite documentary--a must see for all those foodies out there--"A Bite of China."

Any part of this seven-episode 2012 documentary about food in China will mesmerize you--the photography is stunning and the history is amazing. The scale of things, as usual, is off the chart--the sheer number of plants, animals, fungi and other organisms--and the thousands of years of experimentation with them and the variety of geographical settings for harvesting them. The English version of the documentary is here: http://english.cntv.cn/special/a_bite_of_china/homepage/index.shtml

But back to the mushrooms. "Mogu" are what many Westerners first picture when they think of mushrooms, but they're a little more expensive than their darker spotted cousins "xianggu."

xianggu    en.wikipedia.org

Here are more mushrooms, from the wonderfully cheap jing zhong gu, widely available. . .
(screenshot of photo on bostonfoodandwhine.com)

To the astronomically expensive and rare songrong (which I've never had).
(screenshot from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matsutake

The documentary showed these and many more varieties of mushrooms being harvested and cooked, but also talked about scores of other foods including lotus root. 

Of course, everyone knows what the beautiful lotus flower looks like, and if you've lived in China for more than a week you've probably eaten some lotus root. As for me, I just bought some from my vegetable man an hour and a half ago, partly because I like the crunch it gives other vegetables that go soft when cooked (tomatoes, eggplant, and so on), partly because I think it's pretty when sliced, and partly because it's fairly nutritious. I didn't realize, though, the challenge of harvesting lotus root from muck that might be as thick as half-formed concrete without breaking apart the lotus root, which grows like beads on a string.

Screenshot of image on www.flowerpicturegallery.com

One way to slice lotus root (can also be diced into little bits)
Hungrypassport.blogspot.com

So, I was reminded of this fascinating film when having lunch with my linguist buddy at the school cafeteria on Wednesday. I noticed something mixed in with my peppers and other vegetables that was a bit like a bottle-brush-shaped noodle. Lots of little bottle brush things played peek-a-boo through the vegetable medley. Maybe another kind of mushroom. Those! My friend stood up and pointed to two places on her lower back, about where I'd expect kidneys, but these did not look like any kidney I'd ever seen. I'm still not sure if they were kidneys and, if so, from what animal.

That somehow prompted my friend to pull out her surprise--she'd brought me a gift--a bag of delicious Dragon Eyes (or Longan). I thought I'd had them before, thinking they were Lychees, but I hadn't. (Indeed, Longan and Lychees are similar but apparently not exactly the same.) Such delicious little sweet and sour fruit. And so aptly named.

Making a wish

Thanks to all of the well wishers, beginning with Ted and Cathy, who recently visited me in Beibei. Yes, I just celebrated my second birthday in China.

My birthday was a damp, misty day in the 40's (F), about what it's been all week. I had a full morning of Chinese classes, but Wednesday is one day I don't teach. I thought I'd catch up on listening to audio files on my computer in the afternoon at home, but I discovered that all of Ban Zhu Cun was without electricity for most of the day. So, bundled in my long down jacket, I just focused on writing characters until fellow Peace Corps volunteer Keri Ann arrived to practice talking in Chinese.

She pretended she knew nothing about my birthday, acting surprised when Olga showed up with birthday cake, wine (a very special treat), and plans to go to a nearby Uyghur restaurant I'd never been to--where the Muslim cooks served us three delicious dishes with eggplant, mushrooms, and potato and sesame.

My special friend Li Ling and her daughter had earlier brought by another cake, and "Merry" gave me shoes that she had painted herself with special sayings. One message reads "you peng zi yuanfang lai, bu yi yue hu?" It means "Will you be very happy if your friends come to visit you from far away?"  The short phrase means "it rocks," "cool," or "awesome"

These shoes are too special to wear--a good thing, for my feet are too big for just about any women's shoes made in China, including these. Thanks to Ou Yang for bundles of fruit, to Martha Mockus for a half dozen homemade brownies made with real chocolate, and, of course, to dear ones all--including sons and sibs, also Jo Ann, Marty, Jim, Aunt Grace, Jane, Ben, Inge, Kathleen, Eleanor, Crawford, Sandy and Patti among others--for good wishes and more.

My brothers Ted and Paul have birthdays on the same day, nine years apart, and my sister Mary and I have birthdays that are close enough. Here's wishing Mary the very best in just a few days! Thanks to Chris, Ana, Ben and Nick for the b-day plan.

Humbled by Hanzi

Learning Hanzi (Chinese characters) isn't the only thing that humbles me. The fact of the matter is I often don't really know what I'm eating, I'm not always 100% sure who is talking on the other end of the cell phone until I'm part way into it, and I frequently miss big chunks of what they're saying. All this is very humbling. So, before returning to the mysteries of Hanzi, I want to share today's mystery. I was having lunch in one of the school canteens with a linguist buddy of mine (who speaks English as well as I speak Chinese--not very well) when she commented on what I had selected to eat. I'm used to eating many unusual (to me) mushrooms and small plants, so it was with considerable surprise that I discovered this dish consists of cocks' combs:

But more humbling, perhaps, is the ruled notebook used when learning to write Chinese characters (Hanzi), reminiscent of dotted lined paper used in second grade. I feel like a primary school child when sent to the blackboard to write a list of new vocabulary words in characters--but I love it. I love being a student, and I love learning this amazing visual/verbal art form that combines story, picture, history, symbol. For me anyway, it requires Zen-like concentration to make the characters, arranging them just so in the tiny space and then distinguishing each character from all the other characters making use of some of the same radicals.

You might be able to make out a word or two with Roman letters in the notebook above (above all but the very last rows of characters) : "ma," "ne" "na," "chi" "a," "jiao," and "tu," the Pinyin version of the characters (but without tones--sorry). Foreigners who are used to a Roman alphabet have Pinyin as a bridge, but we are weaned from Pinyin as soon as we can make sense of the characters. The Vietnamese and Korean students in my class have a little easier time with Chinese characters.

I find myself in a near meditative trance writing scores of these characters, trying to memorize them. As you can see on the blackboard below, one radical might be repeated in lots of different words, but often the radical is associated with a meaning, like the caozitou, which has something to do with "grass" and appears in the character for many fruits--but also in the character for "England" and "English," I don't know why. Similarly, the three tiny strokes called san dian are often associated with water, as in the "hai" part of  "Shanghai," a seaside city.

The character for "first"--"xian"--shows up in the character for "choose" and "wash," so for a while I got these very different words mixed up.  But then I learned to notice more things, like those three dian (associated with water) in the character for "wash." The characters for "thousand," "I," and "look for" at first looked very similar to me--and I almost needed a magnifying class to distinguish them. And sometimes the exact same character does have radically different meanings.

Learning this millennia-old amazing art form is a challenge for my weary brain, but I utterly love studying it. Sometimes you have the etymology of the word packed in via pictograms, sometimes ideograms, all mixed with phono-semantic compounds.

Thank goodness the pragmatic founders of the People's Republic of China wanted to simplify Hanzi to promote literacy and to make it easier for folks like me to get a handle on writing characters; however, the more complex traditional form is still used in Taiwan. I'd really be in trouble there.

Another time, I might write  a little more about the evolution of this amazing form of writing, from the "oracle bones" (those ancient carvings on pieces of bones and turtle shells) to the current simplified Hanzi (easier to learn but harder to associate with the original pictures). I might also comment on the idea of a dictionary--imagine what a Chinese dictionary is like, organized by the number of strokes. No alphabet, remember.

Now I have to shift from student mode back to teacher mode--I need to respond to about seventy audio-files from my sophomore Conversational English students and about the same number of papers from my senior Academic Writing students. It will be a long weekend. . .

Medicinal Gunk

Olga drinking tea - students made the paper roses

My Russian friend Olga and I met as usual this Friday afternoon, even though our dear tutor is off in Chengdu today, competing with thousands of other Chinese graduates on an exam for prospective civil servants. A small fraction of the test-takers will be invited to interview for an even smaller number of job openings. We wish Xiaodan the best. Competition is fierce.

As a graduate student, Xiaodan both teaches and tutors Chinese.

Xiaodan will no doubt tell Olga and me all about her views of the exam system next week. We've already discussed--to the degree my limited vocabulary allows it--her views about job hunting and working conditions for young people in China.

Today, though, Olga and I told each other stories--in Chinese--about our week. Without a doubt, the highlight of my week was fetching my brother Ted and his wife Cathy from a hotel in Chongqing and bringing them back to Beibei for a day. They regaled me with tales of their travels, from ancient monasteries in the desert northwest to the cold splendor of Tibet in the southwest, filled me in on family news, and traipsed around the university with me in Beibei, getting a taste of my life here.

If seeing Ted and Cathy was the best thing that happened, though, meeting two old men in the park below my apartment was the weirdest thing. The park is full of mostly older people doing taijiquan most mornings and it wasn't unusual to have someone come up and stare at me as I cut through on my way to classes. Curiosity kept me from shaking off one elderly man who seized my wrist, took my pulse and within seconds put his finger in two places, creating some noticeable warmth. (He was small enough I could have thrown him if I took a mind to--I wasn't threatened and don't under ordinary circumstances let people touch me. I had no intention of paying him for whatever service he thought he was providing.) He then slapped a piece of paper (below) with some medicinal gunk on my back, which was a bit of a feat, given that I was wearing a coat and two shirts. I did at that point shrug him off and "mei you'd" him when his notebook with fees came out. Sitting on rocks nearby, watching, were the folks from whom I regularly buy vegetables.

Later that morning, when a woman from Malawi in my Chinese class offered to help wash it off my back, the classmate with a PhD from Suriname said it looked just like a poultice her mother makes. Even after we had peeled the paper off and scrubbed most of the tar-like gunk off my back, enough of the gunk was left on the paper that, when the paper was placed in my notebook, it bled through to the other side. My back looks somewhat similar.

Even later, when I was talking with some Chinese students in my English classes, they smelled it and earnestly told me that the tar-like gunk is very good for you, even though only one could speculate what it is made out of. That student, who said her mother is a doctor, thought it was made from boiled donkey hide. Others told me about the pain relief such gunk provides.

My sense is that nearly all of my Chinese friends, including MDs, are respectful of Chinese medical practices, even if they also--even primarily--use Western ones. The same doctor may offer both Eastern and Western diagnoses and therapies. Hospitals, too.

The men in the park were something close to charlatans and many herbal remedies have no evidence-based support--and yet I suspect that among the mostly-benign-but-useless treatments are many treatments the West would benefit from learning more about. At the very least we should be willing to research them, and I suspect we have something to learn from a much more holistic perspective of health.  Even if most of these treatments, some millennia-old, are useless, I find utterly amazing that some seem to work spectacularly well. Evidence seems to be mounting that acupuncture, for instance, works in particular contexts (see http://newsinhealth.nih.gov/issue/feb2011/feature1 ).

Without the benefit of many contemporary research tools, imagine the path of discovery for these ancient Chinese medical practitioners. Hen youisi.