Halloween party

I had no idea what I got myself into when I said "YES!" to a student to who asked for a Halloween Party. Heck, I'm all for sharing a holiday that celebrates freaks and creeps! But Halloween can a spooky thing when you're planning a party that will be attend by anywhere from 8 to more than 200 college students!

Just like in the scary stories I shared with my classes this week, party prep went horribly wrong. My site mate got called to Chengdu for PC duty :(. Then the administration said I couldn't use the big activities room and instead assigned me a lecture hall, due to which I had to scrap some of the games I had planned. Then the computer in that room wouldn't play any of my Halloween movies. It was turning into a nightmare.......

Until the Magnificent 7 saved the day.
The members: Yedda, Kathy, Rose, Olivia, Sandy, Izzy and Lily.
All of them are my students, and all of them are wonderful.

Lily's got guanxi, Yedda's a computer whiz, Kathy knows where to buy the necessary supplies. Sandy, Izzy, Rose and Olivia have pointed out things I overlooked, things I wouldn't have known to prepare for if not for their advice. The best thing is that they're all so willing to help. :)

I was going to treat them to dinner tomorrow to thank them, but then they asked to cook for me. Hah! I hope I didn't agree too quickly! So tomorrow, they're making jiaozi at my place.

I am still looking for game ideas, but so far I have 4:
Pumpkin bowling
Chubby Bunny
Footloose Balloon Pop
Balloon Squat Relay

Hopefully everyone will get a chance to play. Winners will get prizes - trick-or-treat bags, sent by Mom, stuffed with candy.

Also,there will be a costume contest IF students dress up, I will show "Hocus Pocus" IF (big, big IF!) the computer and projector work, and there will be popcorn for all IF Kathy can help me find some in Fuling tomorrow. I'm trying not to let all these IFs spook me!

hillbilly in the city

This past weekend I turned 22 - that's right, the PCV baby is finally older than her students!

My site mate told the students about my birthday, so the past week has been a sort of b-day parade, with them either singing or shouting birthday wishes in unison at the start of each class. Their thoughtfulness always makes me regret having to assign work, and never have I been more tempted to scratch a lesson than today.

As soon as the bell rang this morning, my students jumped out of their seats and broke out into song, then presented me with a HUGE, beautiful cake. After confirming that I am indeed swine flu-free (according to them, there are 4 confirmed cases at our school), they had me blow out the edible chocolate candles. Flustered, I then preceded to do a lesson in the format of a Jeopardy game, but just so that you don't think I'm totally ungrateful, I announced a longer-than-usual break, during which they devoured every bit of that cake. I left for a moment to speak with a student, and when I came back, it was gone! haha I wish I had taken pictures of them - you should have seen their frosting-covered smiles! :P

Over the weekend I was able to celebrate American-style with another PCV who is also born on the 17th. I met her and her city-mates, who came in from Guizhou province, in Chongqing city, where a generous PCV hosted us. I think the most suitable adjective for Chongqing is MASSIVE. I felt like such a country hick, so in awe was I of the sheer immensity of the city - the 30M people who live there, the buildings, the light rail, the swanky shops and clubs, etc. But it's not just huge. It's actually quite beautiful too, especially at night, when the lights are reflected in the many rivers that criss-cross throughout the city.

While in Chongqing, we went shopping for Western food items, went out to a fancy Indian restaurant, and went dancing. That's right, clubbing in the Peace Corps, baby. :) I think my favorite part of the weekend was when one of the PCVs cooked us breakfast. He made French toast and CHEESE omlettes! I have been craving cheese like crazy, and I swear, none of the stores in Fuling carry cheese.

But even though I was impressed by the enormity of the city and all of its Western products, I can't imagine living there. It's a great place for a hillbilly like me to visit, but I would never last there. Laid-back Lidu is the perfect fit for this lover of lazy afternoons. =)

If you can't already tell, I love the way my students write, and I love sharing cute messages. Here's two:

I heard that you will go to chongqing tomorrow. Have a good journey. And then I want to tell you something in advance. HAPPY BIRTHDAY! In fact, we hope that you could happy everyday as bright as your smile.Happy!

Happy birthday!
Today is also my birthday.It is wonderful that we have birthday at the same day.So today is a D-day,a happy D-day.

Reading Lolita in China

I can't help but follow the last post with a brief reflection on two recent reads, Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran and Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. So skip this post if you're looking to read about anything that has to do with China! :P

"It is only through these empty rituals that brutality becomes possible," Nafisi writes in her memoir on her time in the Islamic Republic of Iran, lived and witnessed through the wide imaginative lenses of literature's finest. Habits, at least those that are hollowly performed, are fatal - in killing the mind, they obliterate reflection and creativity. What then, she seems to be asking, is to stop us from killing? Nabokov's term for this, Nafisi notes, is "poshlust." It denotes the "close relationship between banality and brutality."

An active mind requires much energy, and hegemony's poison, especially when offered in the form of convenience, is awfully tempting for lazy Wikipedia-reliant kids like me. Life would be much too rigorous if each experience was entirely void of familiarity, and certainly there is "good" to be found in tradition. But "good" rituals should be able to withstand our interrogation - they should not collapse from the mere puff of a question.

Nafisi exhibits yet another gem of Nabokov's: "curiosity is insubordination in its purest form." To wonder is to resist.

Later she backs this assertion, which I take to be the underlying "moral of the story," with a quip from Adorno: "The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in one's own home."

Fiction opens for us a book-sized window to morality because it "question[s] traditions and expectations when they seem too immutable." And what lies at the heart of morality? Empathy. Empathy allows us to live as someone else - not completely, but enough to make us uncomfortable, enough to provoke curiosity.

Strange how, while reading Nabokov's Lolita, I found myself empathizing with the narrator, a pedophile who lives entirely to rape his 12-year-old step-daughter. To my horror, there I was, internalizing the turmoil of the very character who epitomizes immorality. But this is merely a symptom of Nabokov's brilliance - in revealing the complexity of his characters, his words restore humanity, not only to the non-human Lolita, in her role as an object of perverted pleasure, but also to the inhuman Humbert.

As my students have the habit of saying, "in a word," Lolita is for me an extreme example of the power of the imagination.

have empty

In Chinese, free time is translated as "have empty."

I teach each day until noon. Some days are hectic, but on most days, I have lots of empty.
So, what the heck do I do with all of my free time, aside from writing vapid blog entries?

Well, I read. A lot.
Lately I've been worrying that I've been spending too much time loving, betraying and dying in fictive lands, and conversing with the echoed creeds of dead philosophers, instead of investigating the nooks and crannies of this real-life Chinese adventure. After all, I did not journey all the way to the Middle Kingdom to read. Or did I?

I remember how, as a student, I'd fantasize about indulging in novels and political theory (not just the Wikipedia summaries), but I never had enough time - ironically, I never had the space for emptiness. So naturally, I take life here in Lidu as a sort of dork's paradise - a place to be wooed by Vladimir Nabokov, to be dazzled by Isabel Allende, to be teased by Karl Marx and Michel Foucault, to be humbled by bell hooks, to be inspired by Azar Nafisi and Martha Minow.

Still, because I am wary of being absent more often than I am present, I fill the void with other leisurely activities, such as playing tag with ten-year-olds, chatting (or at least, attempting to chat) with the elderly gardeners, translating in acrylic and gouache my impressions of China, and swapping ex-boyfriend stories with my site mate. But it's getting colder by the day and increasingly difficult to deny myself afternoons curled in bed with a book.

Today I was greatly encouraged by an email I received from a good friend, in which she mentioned speaking with a returned volunteer who read a book a day while serving in Africa. It's nice to know that I'm not alone in this literary la-la land. In fact, this magical little world, to which the Peace Corps is definitely invited, even has a queen, her majesty Nina Sankovitch. Now she needs to get a life. :P

china rain

acrylic on... paper. there's no canvas in lidu!

National Day and Mid-Autumn Festival

*dedicated to Liu Liu! holidays make me think of you :) miss you, sis!

Today in the PRC we are smack-dab between two holidays: National Day and Mid-Autumn Festival. A week of festivities translates into eight days of vacation! It's needless to say that I'm quite fond of China's version of October. =)

Yesterday was China's National Day -- the 60th Anniversary of Communist China. 60 is a number of great significance because in the Chinese zodiac, 60 is formed by the 5 elements and 12 animals. One of the teachers in my department told me that a man's 60th birthday celebration will always trump his 50th, a tradition that reminds me of the Japanese kanreki.

Because of the huge significance attached to China's 60th b-day, you can imagine what a huge deal it was, even in remote little towns like Lidu. For a week or so leading up to the big day, explosions of fireworks could be heard at all times during the night, filling the air with festive anticipation.

Nationalist sentiments of any kind usually make me feel uneasy, but I was so impressed by the scale of the preparations being made throughout the country that when yesterday finally arrived, I could not help but feel quite festive myself. Earlier in the week, one of my students taught me how to say, "Happy National Day" in Chinese, and I found myself gushing the phrase to every passerby I met. The waiban assistant later explained that people don't actually say that to each other, which explains the confused smiles I got in return...

Because most of the action was in Beijing, my sitemate and I went to the OK Restaurant in hopes of catching glimpses of the massive military parade. As we treated ourselves to cold beer and a delicious meal of lotus root, spicy eggplant and kungpao chicken, we couldn't help but gape at Aunty Huang's TV set. For a good ten minutes, a convertible carried the dignified Hu Jintao through a seemingly endless, impeccable stretch of saluting soldiers.

Unfortunately, we missed the live broadcasting of the parade, but video clips of it are all over the internet. It's utterly amazing! The snazzy uniforms, the synchronized marching, the baton twirling... check it out! Here's a good article/video/slideshow package by the NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/02/world/asia/02china.html?_r=1&ref=world.

The second holiday of the month is tomorrow, Oct. 3, Mid-Autumn Festival, a harvest festival celebrated when the moon is at its fullest. In honor of the moon, which in Chinese folklore is said to be inhabited by the beautiful, luminous goddess Chang'e, the traditional food is the mooncake or yuebing. Mooncakes are delicious little pies that are usually stuffed with dried fruit and nuts. The waiban gave my sitemate and I each a big bag stuffed with various types of mooncakes, and for the past several days, I've been having them for breakfast. I know that in some parts of China this holiday is celebrated with the hanging of lanterns, but I'm not quite sure what will happen in Lidu. I'll be celebrating with some students over hotpot, so hopefully they'll be able to fill me in on Lidu's traditions.

**(updated)
Just got back from a delicious fish hotpot, and following an unfinished dinner conversation on mooncakes, a very industrious student of mine just sent me this explanation:

Hi kacie,

En! Now I am writing to you to tell you something about the moon cake.

It’s the paticular food of the Mid-Autumn Festival in china. There is an old saying, in the ancient times, there was ten suns in the sky and the heat make the crops died, consider the farmers’ lives, the emperor asked a guy named hou yi to shoot nine suns down, and then the world became cool in winter and hot in summer, the spring and the autumn is warm. After that, the emperor gave him a pill of immortality, but it was ate by his wife, a beauty everyone her Chang E and she flied into the moon and lived in the moon till today. The people lay out their mooncakes as an offering to her during Mid-Autumn Festival.

Till now, there are many kinds of mooncakes, while the basic materials are: flour, vegetal fat, white sugar, pignut, sesame, egg, sunflower seeds almond, pistachio, pecan, cashew, macadamia and something else. It all depends, different tastes would add the different materials.

Today I am very happy because I caught the chance to speak english. Thank you very!

Oh! Is that mooncake the gentleman gave you delicious ?

Ok! That’s all!

Happy everyday!

yours.

中秋接快乐！