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Beijing, China: Week 8, Part 1 (How I Got Here)
t. I’m crazy because I like it. I’ll run around in it. I tolerate it much, much better than cold. California girl I am. Despite the smog that today has left my throat feeling sandpapered and phlegm-filled, and despite the enormity of the city (how can a block possibly be so long, and subway stops so far apart?), I am thrilled to be here.
But first, ( Read more... ) -
Hunchun, China: Week 7, Part 3 (Street Food)
Tony takes off for Beijing tomorrow, to use an entire year's worth of vacation (almost 21 days) so he treated us to dinner as a farewell. Someone gave me decision rights, and so instead of going to a restaurant, we went and ate street food by the Hunchun night market. What is normally a quiet, wide road running alongside a large square becomes, at ( Read more... ) -
Hunchun, China: Week 7, Part 2 (Laundry)
When I get home to Durham, I am going to love my washing machine sooo much. We've got one here that does a fantabulous job of jolting your clothes about while screaming like the Star Wars trash compactor, and the water only goes out, not in, so you have to constantly fill buckets of water from the tap to pour in. Also it doesn't really rise or spin ( Read more... ) -
Wasp
This morning it is not light but sound that heaves me into wakefulness, a hymenopteric thrum that goes on, desolate and uneven, until I lever myself out of bed and go see the fuss. Shock sharpens me. Stuck between my curtain and the windows is a wasp of Paleozoic proportion, her palm-length bulk rising again and again as her head mows the glass and ( Read more... ) -
Privileges
In the crinkled, half-even light of video sent across the pool of the ocean, I watched at 3 am as an incomparable woman, Misuzu Miyashita, married the love of her life, Alvin Schexnider. They wed in Alice Millar Chapel, on Northwestern's campus in Evanston. From my vantage point - a little laptop stuck on a pew - I saw the sun, which in summertime ( Read more... ) -
Hunchun, China: Week 7, Pt 1 (However it is, is how it should be.)
There is a Chinese saying has been passed down from my great-grandmother, to my grandmother, to my mother, to me. "Zen me lai, jiu zhen me shi." Roughly translated, it means, "However it is, is how it should be."
I shared a post last week from the Pioneer Woman's blog, which said,
"...that’s where faith comes in, whether you’re in agriculture, tech ( Read more... ) -
Hunchun, China: Week 6, Pt 2 (Sight, and How To Not Become Bitter)
Yesterday I came back from Chunhua, grimy from five days spent in the villages of rural China, my hair and clothes filmy with the scent of cigarettes, of wood-smoke, of soil. You may think that I sat in the middle of cornstalks for five days, and in a manner of speaking I did. But in each village, the roads are well-paved. We check to make sure ( Read more... ) -
Hunchun, China: Week 6, Pt 1 (Hamburgers, the Chinese-American Way)
Ham Bao, they call them. Amazingly, there's no McDonald's in Hunchun. But there's also no movie theatre, and no American chain restaurants at all, so maybe it's not so surprising.
I'd been promising Tony I'd make hamburgers for a while. We brought master's student volunteers in from Beijing Academy of Sciences to help us do the surveys. They only ( Read more... ) -
Hunchun, China: Week 5, Pt 3 (Skipping Out)
Today I sat down and backed up 10 years of LiveJournal entries, one month at a time (the only way LJ allows you to do it). When I finished, my feeling of distress came not from the time consuming nature of the task, but the discovery that a number of months were completely empty. What happened then? I found myself wondering ( Read more... ) -
Hunchun, China: Week 5, Pt. 2 (Picking Up)
It is 10pm, still warm in the house from the day's heat. Summer has finally arrived, and I am remembering how to be a manager. I think some of these skills must go in the same parts of my brain as my languages: unused, they disappear into moldy recesses. Only later do I find them, half-eaten and smelling sour.
I've forgotten so quickly all of the ( Read more... )