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JISHOU, HUNAN — I should go to bed, but I have to share this joke a Chinese friend told me. I swear I did not make this up. “You know the problem with Western food? You eat it, and an hour later you’re hungry again.” Good night, folks. You’ve been a great audience. Possibly related posts:
JISHOU, HUNAN — With the end of the term approaching, I have been so busy lately that writing anything substantive for this blog was well nigh impossible. I’ll try to recap recent events as best I can, starting with Christmas Eve. All the colleges here at Jishou University hold some kind of end-of-term/welcome-the-new-year party, reminiscent of those old movies where they say, “Hey, let’s put on a show!” Members of the colleges sing, dance, act in skits, or play instruments, and the audience plays some silly games. (I joined in on one game a week ago. Blindfolded, with a partner riding piggyback and giving directions, I had to stomp on balloons to burst them. We won a 2-liter of Coke.) The College of International Exchange is the only one that puts on a Christmas-themed performance, scheduled suitably for Dec. 24. Our students spent weeks rehearsing their acts, while we faculty managed to cram our practice time into a few afternoons. Being a white-haired, bearded fellow, I was asked to play Father Christmas, and students also pressured me to sing a song. So I was really busy that night. I discovered that our students are multi-talented, with considerable performing chops. We gave the College of Music and Dance a run for its money, with our dancers, singers, instrumentalists and amateur actors. We faculty managed to pull off dancing a waltz to the tune of “Edelweiss,” to the cheers of the audience, and I managed not to freeze on stage to sing “I Wonder as I Wander” and “The Christmas Song” — a cappella — passably well. Possibly related posts:
JISHOU, HUNAN — As elated as I was to see Barack Obama elected president, the full emotional impact of the event did not hit me until my class this afternoon. I got choked up enough I had to stop for a minute or two to pull myself together. I was giving the freshmen a short lesson on the election, on Obama’s background, and what he still needs to do before taking office in January. I started giving them a rundown of the inauguration, including the part where the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court For someone in my particular age bracket, the image of a black man actually ascending to the White House finally puts to rest the acrimony and hatred we remember growing up through the 1950s and ’60s. I watched the news with my dad, and saw the riots in Los Angeles, the racist presidential campaign of George Wallace, the killing of Martin Luther King Jr. While I was not directly affected, living as we were in a gerrymandered-white school district on the North Shore of Long Island, those scenes still had a big emotional impact. Simply put, my parents didn’t raise me to hate people because of their skin color. Possibly related posts:
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