Christina in China

This week, I sat at a rice porridge (xifan, for all you China-experienced folk) hot pot dinner and spoke little to no English.  Granted, I didn’t speak much Chinese, either.  But I could keep up with the approximate meaning of the conversation.  I got a joke, after it was explained to me.

And yesterday, I initiated two conversations with my colleagues in the department in Chinese, showing the pictures in last year’s Lanthorn to Zhang Laoshi and talking to Liu Ya Ping, who is already patient and taught me Chinese children’s games last weekend.  I learned how to say confidence (zixiang, I think, but maybe I forgot).

I told my auntie about how I missed my family in the U.S. and semiunderstood her response about mother-daughter guanxi and how it’s special.

I asked Petrel to find someone to tutor me informally in Chinese, rote memorization of sentences and phrases with a tape recorder to improve fluency and vocabulary, and she offered to do it herself.  For that matter, I’ve started speaking a little bit of Chinese to people I normally speak to in English.

I had a Talk with Josh on the phone last week.  The important but good kind.  (No break-ups in the future.)

Last weekend, at the little country retreat (nong jia le) where the foreign language department teachers went to shua, I stubbornly refused to give up on the kids jumping game the kids and Wei Dan and Liu Ya Ping were playing.  I kept trying until I got it.  I asked Xiong Hui Xin (Wendy) to explain and teach me shen ji, a card game.

I tried to explain some of the conditions of West Virginia to Lai Laoshi in Chinese.  All the sentences were muddled and had to be corrected, but it was a step.

I washed my clothes in the brown stream again, this time a bit more easily than last time but still with aching legs.

I spoke to little kids riding their bike home from school and understood the response they made under their breath.  (How guai ya!  “Wow, weird.”)

I’ve started taking others by the arm (Petrel, Future, Chen Fang, Anna) when we’re walking instead of waiting for them to take my arm.

It’s small steps, I think.  Little steps toward bravery.  I want to keep taking them–to seek out relationships instead of just hanging out with the people who most aggressively pursue me.  I want to not be afraid to raise topics that encourage my students and friends to think.  I want to read and write instead of surfing websites in my free time.  I want to try to penetrate the Western membrane that coats China and get to the culture underneath.

After seven months here, I feel like I’m just starting to tap what’s underneath.

Tags: Travel

This entry was posted on Friday, March 24th, 2006 at 9:07 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.