茴来了
When you get your first pay you appreciate that they don't do anything bigger than a 100 RMB note, a big red note with a big red Mao on it. You can really feel like a gangster when you're given a wodge of them. I feel I've earned it though - teaching is tiring! And that's from someone who's teaching polite, friendly Korean teenagers in groups of three and five, with no pressure and no monitoring - I could be teaching them Chinese for all the school knows - and for only six hours a week. I don't know how real teachers do it. I also don't know what your average Irish schoolteacher would think if her fourteen year old boys bowed politely to her in the corridor.
For the moment I won't worry that it's taking away time I need to write essays or dissertation proposals - if I weren't working productively, exercising 那个, 那个 brain and earning experience 以及 hunks of cash, I would be wasting those hours somehow. I'd be squandering them watching videos on the Internet, like this or this or this or this.
Everyone's started wearing short sleeves and the campus looks lovely in its early summer greens. It was modern Chinese literature first yesterday morning, with the first-years and the great teacher. The air turned dark yellow outside and it thundered. The teacher said that Zhou Zuoren said that good literary criticism is all about "the chance encounters of his spirit in the masterpiece" (他的灵魂在杰作中的奇遇). She said "What does this mean? Who wants to explain this to us?" I said "Excuse me, whose spirit?" and the girls in front said "the critic's." A boy called Awaken Good Things stood up and explained.
Class ended and I dashed under the rain hanging just over our heads, up the street to the baozi stall. The baozi lady grinned and said "we've got fennel ones!" I said "great news!" Fennel went out of season months ago and lately I've started pestering her about it again. I stopped for a pearl milk tea and couldn't believe it - there are swallows nesting in the busy entrance to the market, just over the pearl milk tea stand. You could stand on a chair and touch the nest. I said to the pearl milk tea boy who was reading the paper, "Wow. Do Chinese people say swallows bring good luck?" but he looked slightly blank (it was a silly question) and I took a peng-peng home.
Today I went to the Xinhua bookshop at the other side of the city, mainly to look for books about my dissertation topic. I've never used Chinese language sources for an essay before and have no idea about anything, like what's suitable and what's guff. When faced with a table full of books that all seem to cover more or less the same ground, my eyes start to come undone and part of me blithers. "Chinese writing is like little pictures!" There were three men in blue overalls nearby, fiddling with something in the ceiling, and they were wondering why I would pick up books I couldn't understand. I was his mother wondering that too. I'd like better Chinese, please.
My Dalianese friend with the Dublin accent is in China again, the one I said was princely because he and his girlfriend were so helpful when I arrived last September. They're getting married and I think she's going to Ireland for a while. Soon time to buy my flight home. It's not real that I have two months left and then it'll end with another of those long, strange, tiled, clean, plastic and metal trajectories through international airport lounges, with a bag and a feeling of feet not talking to the ground. And how unreal to be in Ireland! I have serious Schrödinger's Cat issues about this when I think about it so late at night, issues which could only be resolved by the convergence of all matter, time and potentiality to a single point which consequently wouldn't even really be there.