Time Marches On

Well, believe it or not, this weekend marks our first full month in China. We still feel new, we still feel like we are on vacation, but many things that at first seemed so strange are beginning to seem normal. I hardly notice funny signs in bad English anymore; I've just come to expect them. We are still enjoying Chinese food, but are getting tired of the similar flavors. Maybe this is because we only know how to order about four dishes and eat two of them for lunch and two for dinner almost every day. Last night we caved and went to a Western-style restaurant (more like a Western theme restaurant) called Babela's Kitchen and ate spaghetti just to mix it up. It tasted Chinese, but it still hit the spot.

I am happy to report that Gina has returned to China. I went to pick her up from the airport on the night of the Mid-Autumn Festival, which seemed appropriate. It will be nice to have her here. Last night we went to get side-by-side hairwash/massages. This is a Chinese luxury. For one to three dollars, you can get your hair lathered up into a beehive of shampoo for about ten minutes, followed by a face, neck, and arm massage. This is a cheap, relaxing evening activity here and the massage is full of unique Chinese techniques we've dubbed things like "the arm jumprope" and the "finger snap." We will make this a weekly occurance.

I have also just completed my first week of teaching. I have one graduate-level Modern American Literature class, four graduate-level "communicative English" classes and two freshman "oral English classes." The literature students are my favorites. They all love Jane Austen and I'm about to blow them away with a T.S. Eliot/Pound lecture followed by some Hemingway and Faulkner, eventually leaving them in the dust with Barthelme. I hope they enjoy the ride. The school is a business/finance school, so the graduate students are all studying economics or accounting or other financial majors I know nothing about. Their biggest goal is to get a job with an American or international company, so we do lots of lessons on resume writing and interviewing skills. They are all very smart, but their English is not so good and they only have one semester to work on it. I keep telling them I'm not a magician, but they seem to think I can transform them all into native speakers by January. The freshman I am babysitting for a colleague who had to return to the States. I only wanted to take them on for a few weeks, but I have gotten very attached to them already. They are so unlike American freshman. No drinking or sex or fraternities; just studying. They are from all over China and I am learning so much about every province. We are all new to Shanghai, so we spend a lot of time practicing English and talking about this "vibrant, international" city (they love that word, vibrant).

So, things were going pretty well for our first month until we recieved some bad news yesterday. One of our new Danish friends committed suicide Wednesday night, shortly after Peter's last conversation with him. This was really a blow. He was set to become one of our closest friends in China. Peter and I both instantly liked him. He was Peter's weight-lifting buddy and we had invited him to live with us while he waited for a room in the foreign students' dorm. As with any suicide, we are left with many, many questions. It's hard to imagine why someone would set off on an adventure like this, moving to Shanghai to start a new life, only to want to end it in a few weeks. We are very saddened by the loss of our friend, but clearly this is what he wanted.

Sorry to end on a downer, but life in Shanghai is not all funny signs and turtles in the hallway (they're still there, by the way). It's like life anywhere else, "full of ups and downs"--an idiom my students love. We press on. We are making many new friends and next week is a holiday, so we are excited to finally have the time to really explore Shanghai and the surrounding areas, expanding our world away from the university.