Week Eleven Recap

Hi! Another week in the books. Let’s recap.

Sunday

Since I completed all of my homework on Saturday, this Sunday was a free day for me. I started off the morning with a phone call to a friend back home, then one with my mom over lunch. I did a bit of organizing and tidying up before heading out for the afternoon, since it was such a beautiful day in Beijing. In my four years of living on the East Coast, I never experienced beautiful fall weather this consistently; just saying.

My roommate’s birthday is this week, so I decided to head to the flea market to look for something blue – she’s so reserved that pretty much the only thing I know she really likes is the color blue. I ended up buying a beautiful turquoise bracelet, but the real win was being able to walk around outside and “window shop” for a few hours in the sunshine. I’m feeling more confident in my Chinese now and I’m stuttering less, which means that pretty much every stall owner tells me how amazing my Chinese is. Granted, they want me to buy their products and have incentive to compliment me, but their surprised faces are still an ego boost.

When I came back home, I took a nap (on accident), watched two episodes of a Chinese show (required for class, so on purpose), and then uploaded pictures to my blog for a few hours.

Monday

The air pollution in Beijing has been picking up for the last week, and today was the first day we were advised to wear masks. So sad! I’m glad I soaked in a few days of sunshine this weekend, because it seems like those might be gong for the rest of the semester. It was also strangely windy on Monday, which made the weather much colder outside. As a result, I spent most of the day indoors, either prepping for my classes or doing newly assigned homework.

In my first class of the day, we finished up our discussion of the Lama Temple and China’s relationship with Buddhism. We’ll be having an exam on the subject over the weekend, so our next class will be a review session. The most interesting part of class on Monday was when my professor expressed her personal feelings on atomic weapons—that they are critically important and the “great equalizer” among countries’ rulers and their citizens. We had a short debate about this (short because it doesn’t have much to do with Buddhism), but I would have loved to hear more. It sounds like this is the commonly held belief in China.

In my second class, our professors introduced a new assignment we’ll be completing over the next few weeks. We will be writing scripts and filming movies in small groups, then eventually sharing with our cohort. Due to technical difficulties, we only watched one sample film, so I’m not quite sure what to expect yet, but you may see my short film on the blog eventually.

After class, I came back to my room to start on homework for tomorrow, including a presentation, new text, paragraph for recitation, and handwritten vocab words to practice.

Tuesday

This Tuesday was my roommate’s birthday! She was still asleep when I headed out for class, so I left a note and the gift I picked out on Sunday on her desk. I was surprised she didn’t text me about it until I saw that she posted on her WeChat social page a picture of me and the birthday note I left her. So cute!

In my first class of the day, I gave a presentation about Mexico’s first female president and her first 6 months in office. For the presentation, I translated this article from the New York Times, which describes a fascinating political issue Mexico is facing right now (tl;dr, it’s a face-off between their judicial and legislative branches, with the executive branch – and therefore the previously mentioned new president – potentially casting a deciding vote on how the Mexican democratic system proceeds). After my presentation, I listened to one of my classmates present about China’s official stance on the Ukraine War, and then discussed the TV show we were assigned last week. My head was spinning with all of the new vocabulary, and I was happy to head out to lunch afterward.

My second class, “Experiencing Beijing”, was very chill today. We mostly watched examples of movies filmed by previous students and brainstormed about what we want the subjects of our movies to be. My group was still unsure, but at this point we thought we would be filming a documentary-style video. On one hand, I’m excited to get started, but on the other, I know how much work that’s going to be.

In my one-on-one class, we discussed the phenomenon of the “Four Asian Tigers”, which is a name the Chinese Mainland gave South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore in the 80s when the economic development of these territories was skyrocketing. I learned that academic and social elites immigrated to Taiwan during this period and had a huge impact on both the culture of Taiwan and the cultural identity of Taiwan (especially through intermarriage).

After all of my classes, I did some homework, watched results pour in from the American election, and worked on my blog. I also started writing my thesis for the semester, which will focus on the content of my one-on-one class.

Wednesday

This Wednesday started out pretty much as usual, with class prep in the morning and then a review session in my “Hot Topics” course. Nothing too interesting occurred here, so I’m going to jump to the afternoon.

For our “Experiencing Beijing” class, we visited a hutong together, which is the label for traditional and governmentally protected neighborhoods in Beijing. There are many around the city, but the one we visited also had a museum at its center. After touring the museum, I walked around the hutong with my classmates for a while, then went out for cake for somebody’s birthday.

That night, I came back and (surprise, surprise) worked on some homework before hitting the hay a bit earlier than usual. I’ve been extra tired lately, so my bedtime keeps getting earlier and earlier. It’s reminding me of high school, when – at one point – I was going to bed at 8 pm and waking up at 4 am. What a time.

Thursday

For some reason, I woke up this Thursday with a lot of motivation, so I jumped right into some assignments. I’ve been writing the last installment of my one-on-one thesis before I submit the first draft, so I was glad I got to put a few hours into it this morning. I also started brainstorming for a take-home exam for “Hot Topics” due on Saturday that has both a podcast and an essay requirement.

After my morning work session, I headed to class, where I presented on a new vocabulary word related to politics that we hadn’t studied in class. I chose the phrase “Eight Honors and Eight Shames”, which is actually a code of conduct for CCP members that I discovered while flipping through my pocket CCP Constitution a few days ago. (“Honor to those who love the motherland, shame on those who harm the motherland. Honor to those who serve the people, shame on those who betray the people…” on and on, six more times.) The concept was created and added to the constitution in 2006 in response to criticisms that the party had become too capitalist and individualistic. Little bit of Chinese communist history for you, there.

One of my classmates chose to present on “Mutually Assured Destruction”, but he translated the phrase incorrectly, so our teacher went the entire presentation without knowing what he was talking about. (The phrase he accidentally presented on means “everyone dies together” and is typically used satirically, i.e. “We don’t have time for homework; if we all refuse to do it, everyone dies together” type thing.) Turns out, Mandarin has a word for “deterrence” but not for MAD, and according to our French classmate, Nicolas, the French don’t use that term either. Who knew?

When class ended, we all headed to lunch together and debated on whether MAD is a theory or a situation, then hopped back to class to discuss the movies we have to film for our “Experiencing Beijing” class. The films need to depict the culture of an old style of neighborhoods in Beijing called “hutong” (like the one we all visited yesterday). My group decided we would be filming a spoof of Vogue’s 73 Questions interviews, featuring a lifelong resident of a hutong, a tourist, and a shop owner (except it’s just our group members dressed up as those people and answering questions). The hardest part is that our movie can only be nine minutes long, which means we need to ask eight questions every minute. It’s going to be a speed-run.

In between my second and third class of the day, one of the funniest moments of the week occurred. I noticed that the aforementioned Nicolas, who is from a small French island off the coast of Madagascar, was wearing a shirt with sun rays on it, and our conversation went like this:

Me: “Oh my goodness, do you know what your shirt looks like?”

Nicolas: “No, what?”

Me, because we’re not allowed to speak English even to say proper nouns: “That gigantic blue and yellow store in the United States… You know, that place you go when you want something either super random or super cheap.”

Me: *Googles and shows him a photo of the Walmart logo*

Him, shocked and offended: “Do you know what’s on my shirt? It’s my country’s flag!!”

There really wasn’t much to improve on after that, but I still had one more class to go. We discussed Taiwan’s history and the evolution of the KMT between 1950 and 1970, and it may be common sense but I was surprised to learn that when the KMT took over Taiwan and began establishing a government there, their initial goal was a united China under KMT rule rather than an independent KMT state in Taiwan. I also had no idea that from 1945-1971, China’s seat at the United Nations was occupied by the Republic of China (the KMT/government of Taiwan) rather than the People’s Republic of China (representing the mainland).

After a long and productive day, I relaxed in my room for a while before grabbing dinner and settling in at the library.

Friday

This Friday started out differently than most of my Fridays because I didn’t have a presentation to give. I got to sleep in – so exciting! More time for doing laundry, haha. My first obligation was going to Chinese Language Table with my classmates. It might be a placebo, but I feel like the longer I’m in China, the better I get at ordering food. I knocked it out of the park this time by suggesting some fried tofu balls and a special kind of smoked pork. Of course, we all shared, and the meal was delicious.

After our meal, we biked back to campus, and I immediately left campus again with my roommate to an outdoor museum she’s been dying to visit. The museum turned out to really just be one building with a few plaques and a carved stone garden, but it was still beautiful.

By the time we finished wandering around, it was only 3 pm, so we decided to take the subway to a nearby hutong and do some window shopping. Xiaodan found a cute shop online she wanted to visit, so we made a beeline for it and ended up spending about 45 minutes there. Neither of us bought anything, but there were so many Beijing themed products and art pieces. There was also a kitten – too cute!

Xiaodan and I ate dinner together (I had some yummy pork dumplings, which can actually be hard to find around here because they’re usually eaten on holidays), and then we zombie-walked our way back to our dorm, exhausted from a long week and a busy, sight-seeing afternoon. Once we got back, Xiaodan was kind enough to record a podcast episode with me for “Hot Topics” – about the different pressures Chinese and American young people face – before we each settled in to do some homework. I had a relatively productive night, but knew I would need to get up early on Saturday to complete at least one other assignment before attending my fun weekend activities.

Saturday

This Saturday, I had not one but two funs plans. First, I drove an hour away from campus with some of my classmates to an arts festival recommended by our director. We wandered around the festival for about four hours, migrating between the food stalls and the craft stalls. My best find of the day was a crocheted venus fly trap, but I’ll let the pictures do the rest of the talking.

I slept for the entire taxi ride back, and then worked on a few assignments. I finished my biggest homework assignment of the weekend in the nick of time, just before heading out for my second fun activity of the day: karaoke! Unfortunately, I don’t have any pictures of karaoke because I was living in the moment, but this was maybe the most fun I’ve had this semester. We started out singing exclusively Chinese songs (none of which I knew, but I improvised with the lyrics appearing on the screen), but then we eventually began spontaneously translating English songs and singing our own Chinese versions. It actually ended up being great language practice, and I couldn’t have had a better night. This was definitely the most bonded with my classmates that I have felt during this experience. So fun!