Thanksgiving and its preparation

Woosh. So. Thanksgiving. We put it off for a week to give ourselves more time to prepare (we're in China; no one noticed). We invited scads of English teachers and also Mr. Ren and Gao-laoshi and Mr. Wang the tai chi instructor. We (where by "we" I mostly mean Katrina and Julie) spent most of the day in the kitchen making wild rice chicken casserole (the only turkeys available were a two-hour bus ride away, cost three hundred kuai, weighed twelve pounds, and probably wouldn't've fit in our oven anyway), broccoli, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, clover-leaf rolls, fruit salad, pumpkin pie, little cupcake-sized apple pies, and stuffing (the pumpkin pie was actually made a couple days earlier). I went out and bought a whole bunch of forks 'cause we only had three or four (we also had to buy about a dozen new plates); when I got to the grocery store that sold forks (kept in a special glass case with the Western-style spoons and the pliers), I couldn't remember how to say "fork" and ended up asking if they had those American things that weren't chopsticks (they didn't quite understand what I meant (I can't imagine why) until I drew a picture). We used every serving dish and every serving utensil and every plate and every fork that we own.

The meal itself was good. The slightly scary teacher who's the head of the English department came and smiled a lot and was completely non-scary (also, Katrina just miraculously made friends with the second year teachers and managed to get Mr. Ren convinced that it would be a good idea to teach them something other than Gao Kao articles, and I am ecstatic). Everyone smiled a lot, and most of them seemed to like the food. Mr. Ren and Gao-laoshi both described it as being very special, which we've decided was probably meant positively. And… yeah. I don't know. It was a nice night. Not quite just like home, but still pretty nice.

More Generosity

So, more generosity.

Often when we're eating at restaurants, other diners talk about us. At Er You Fan Dian, one of the places we go pretty often, there was a guy who came in for dinner when we were eating. He was there with another man - they were business people, and the first man took a phone call before coming back to sit down. He asked the waitress if we could speak Chinese, and then he asked us how much we would charge to help teach English for his company. We said we couldn't (it's in our contract), and he said something about how ah, we must be helping China to improve her language abilities. We sort of shrugged (we didn't really understand exactly what he was talking about) and he went back to eating. Periodically as he ate, though, he would talk to us - he said that if we ever had any trouble, we should call him - he gave us his phone number and email address and QQ number (QQ is a mostly-Chinese instant messaging service). He said he had a company in Guangzhou (I think; I could be completely wrong). He finished eating and paid the waitress. Then he paid the waitress for our dinner, too. Then he gave each of us a mobile phone card worth 100 kuai. We were… speechless, we were overwhelmed, we were unable to effectively decline (we don't even know how to use the cards). We didn't know how to respond, except to fall in love with everything in China for a while.

Generosity and wushu update

Soooo when last I wrote, I think I mentioned that I had talked to the nice folks at the sporting goods store, and they were going to help me find a place to learn wushu. So. They did! It was the first in a series of interactions with people where they were so, so generous and welcoming that I sort of fell in love with all of China for a while.

I went back to the store the next day, and Lei Xiao Ming tried to take me to meet the instructor at the school, but unfortunately, he turned out to be in Taiyuan that day. We did visit the school, though - it's not what I was expecting; it's a real school. A primary school, I think, and they study math and English and Chinese and all those subjects, but also wushu and tae kwon do and tai chi. Anyway, he asked where we've been around Fenyang, and I said we've gone to Pingyao and Taiyuan, but also to Lao Ye Shan. He asked if we'd been to Wen Feng Ta, and when I said we hadn't, he offered to take us right then. I was excited and happy and a little bit dumb, and I accepted without remembering that probably we had to teach one more middle school kid that afternoon (but Julie is awfully nice and she covered for me), and he took Katrina and me to Wen Feng Ta, the tallest pagoda in... well, in the area, at least. Mr. Ren said once that it was the tallest in China, but we are skeptical. It was... I dunno. It was excellent. It was fun. It was a really good experience, but I don't think I can really narrate it interestingly. The tower was dark dark dark (no electricity) and on every floor, he used his cell phone to take a photo of us standing next to a statue of a zodiac animal/god.

The next night, we did make it to the actual school. We were... mmm, when we read other Carleton people's descriptions of coming to Fenyang, they talked about feeling like movie stars, and we've kind of felt some of that, but not to the extent that other people have described. At the Yu Ying Xue Xiao, we felt that. The students stood in crowds on the balconies to look at us, and we could hear people everywhere whispering, "waiguoren!" Song Bing, who might or might not be in charge of the school, met us and introduced us to the English teachers, and also he started to teach us more tai chi. Every morning at 6:00, we wake up, and he picks us up at the gates of the school at 6:30. He teaches tai chi for an hour (it's not just us, though there are only a few others who are just starting; part way through class we split into two groups and the others work on the sword form), and shows us videos of someone who is probably the fifth-generation head of the Yang branch of tai chi (or something like that), who has a school now in Seattle and has instructional videos in English, and they feed us breakfast and take us home to start work. They are welcoming and smiling and kind, and they are so willing to teach us that we almost feel awkward because we don't know how to respond without feeling like we're taking advantage of them. When I wanted to find a school, I thought maybe I would find someplace that would have classes in the evening, but probably I wouldn't be able to make it all the time, so maybe I'd only get to go once or twice a week. Here, they say we should come whenever we have free time - someone will be available to teach us. When we leave in the morning, they ask if we'll come back in the afternoon (sometime, I'll have to make time to actually do that; we really only practice tai chi in the morning, and as much as I love it, I also want to learn something about wushu).

I really love being able to go to the tai chi school. I like our tai chi instructor here, but he doesn't do a lot of instructing in the classes (he doesn't correct our forms or explain what we're doing) so it's nice to have someone who can take time to show us what we really should be doing. The class at the other school is more satisfying and also... it's something outside of FenZhong. It's maybe a chance to become part of a community. The teachers we meet are friendly - I don't even just mean welcoming and smiling this time, I mean they seem like they want to be our friends. They're closer to our age (at least some of them are) than many of the teachers at FenZhong, and at least some of them don't have babies. So… I'm hopeful. I know that probably we'll still be outsiders for a long time, but maybe not entirely.