life as usual

ha! how ironic. as i was trying to save the post i just wrote, knowing that there was a good chance it would be deleted, i accidentally deleted it. so after a bunch of kicking the ground and cursing, here i am re-writing my post.
basically, it never rains but pours, and my social schedule has gone from basically nonexistant to off-the charts busy. last wednesday, i went to a book group meeting. it meets once a month in a restaurant and we try to read quality modern english-language literature, which is hard to find in qingdao--the english language sections of bookstores are always filled with "classics," often rewritten in simple english for esl students, which means if you're not interested in an abridged version of "a tale of two cities" or something like that, you're bascially out of luck. the head of the book club finds english books and then has them photocopied, and then we all just read the photocopied book, which is the really only feasible way to get bulk copies that isn't prohibitively expensive and time-consuming. i just joined so i didn't get a chance to read last meeting's book, but the book for next time sounds interesting, it's by an indian-canadian author (i don't know if that's native american of south asian) that several people in the group had read and highly recommended. there were about 15 people, and i was the youngest person in the group by a bit, most people seemed to be in their 30s, but it's nice to meet other westerners whose idea of a good time isn't getting really drunk all the time.
on another social front, i have also made to female friends my own age, which is nice because many of the women i've seen at bars look about as friendly as pitbulls and completely uninterested in meeting other women. my one friend is studying chinese at qingdao university. she's been in qingdao only for about 2 months, but lived in kunming two years before teaching english and german. she's technically italian, but is from the culturally austrian part of the tyrolean alps. my other friend studies chinese medicine here, and is from berlin. it's nice to meet other girls who have similar interests as me. i've also met this woman from england who is really nice and who i also have lots in common with, but unfortunately she's going back to england in about 3 weeks.
also, this weekend was halloween, which doesn't mean all that mush if you're chinese, although there is a chinese word for halloween, it's "wan sheng jie," "or 10,000 spirits holiday." the foreigners in qingdao do dress up and have a party, so my italian friend and i went shopping for costumes this past friday. we went to this market known for cheap and gaudy clothes, which there definitely were (though not as cheap as they ought to have been, considering the outrageous markup some saleswomen tried to charge). i ended up with a hideous white satiny skirt for about 10 yuan, as well as some fake flowers and beads. we decided to be angels, and so we also bought some cotton and my friend got a white sheet to make a skirt. though after lots of experimentation, we couldn't get the skirt to look anything like an old sheet wrapped around her waist, so she ended up wearing a different skirt of mine. our wings turned out well, we cut them out of cardboard and glued cotton onto them. they looked really good, except after about 20 minutes in a crowded bar much of the cotton fell off.
dan wins the prize for best costume, he dressed up as a french man. he wore a striped 3/4 length sleeve boatneck shirt, my incredibly petite roommate's jeans and her white belt, a neckerchief, white socks, and a beret. he looked both incredibly ridiculous yet strangely good. dan wasn't as convinced about the "good" part, even though numerous people told him he should dress like that more often. it seems in an international community of europeans, australians, and americans, the one thing we all seem to do is make fun of the french. (the french students studying here did not seem that impressed by the outfit however. that seems to be a general trend though, with me and my friends attempts to impress them with our deep knowledge of french language and our beautiful renditions of french songs.)

so, i'm attempting another post on our notoriously untrustworthy computer, hopefully it won't crash. i have not done a whole lot today, mainly because i am feeling slightly under the weather. having some sort of low-grade sickness is kind of a general state in china, between the somewhat unhygenic food, the small children, and the some what dirty atmosphere, although i had gone through about a month with no cold or digestion issues. this one was pretty inevitable, seeing as dan and our other roommates had all been sick a few days earlier.
today, i lay on the couch and watched a korean soap opera. i have become addicted to korean soap operas through one of my roommates. they are really popular in qingdao--all the dvd stores sell dozens of korean soaps and hundreds of korean movies. they are much better than american soap operas, and a lot shorter--they are only about 12-20 episodes long. the one we are watching now is called "full house," it's about a woman who enters into a contract marriage with a pop star in order to get back her house, yet he is in love with another woman and she is attracted to another man, but they are also both falling in love with eachother. in some ways, korean tv is very similar to american tv, but in other ways, its really different. for example, in one scene, she threatens to divorce him, and he tells her to think about his parents and how much it would hurt them, and what a loss of face it would be to them. she stops and says, yes, i hate you, but i can't do that to his parents. i don't think appeals to filial piety would really keep an arguing american couple together on a soap. also, it's much less steamy--all sorts of love triangles and scandals, and not so much even a peck on the cheek.

other than that, i have also been helping one of my chinese friends study for her postgraduate translation/linguistics exam. she is graduating from qingdao university this spring and wants to study in shanghai, one of the top schools for english linguistics and translation. the test is incredibly difficult--much harder than any standardized test i've seen in america. on one section, she had to read sentences and fill in a missing word from a word bank. the sentences however, were from passages of from authors such as edward said, joseph campbell, and foucault, as well as long grammatically awkward sentences filled with enormous words about saussere, gramsci, the new testement, and marx. the words were things like diachronic, which i had to look up in my english-chinese dictionary, antithesis, realm, structure, structuralist, etc.
there were reading passages with questions that were incredibly convoluted, two about poe, baudelaire and the issues of identity and plagiarism. one of the more straightforward readings was w.e.b. dubois' "double consciousness essay."
there was also a section where she had to identify an error in a sentence (out of a choice four things wrong) and then correct it. one sentence was really hard, i couldn't tell what exactly was wrong and how to correct it, maybe one of you will know:

In the United States, for example, reading may be less essential than it ever was--at least where books are concerned.

the possible options are in bold, which one of those four do you think are wrong, and why?

comment update!

so, i wrote a long blog entry earlier, and then our computer crashed so i lost it, and i haven't felt motivated to write one any time soon, but this is just a quick note. for some unknown reason, we can now read our blog AND all the comments, so feel free to comment away. i've noticed most of our comments are advertisements, which is depressing, so i'm counting on you good people to outdo corporate america.

It's funny, in China being a foreigner means one gets "special treatment," which can be a good or a bad thing. Sometimes it means the price is 3x higher, yet sometimes it means that people give you random gifts or deals. Today, I went to buy some small "sour oranges" which are basically like green-skinned tangerines. I just wanted one or two for a snack, so I picked up two and put them in a bag and asked the man how much they were. He looked at the bag and laughed. He said, "you only want two? okay, it's free." I told him that I was embarrassed (a stock phrase in Chinese which means, among other things, that you can't accept a gift because it's too much). He waved me away and said nonsense. I looked in my wallet for change, but I didn't have anything, all I had was an American nickel, so I gave it to him as a gift. He laughed, and then began to put more tangerines and other fruit into my bag. I asked how much should I pay, and he laughed, saying that between friends, no money was needed. I promised him I would buy more fruit some other time, and went off with my free bag full of fruit.

Speaking of

Speaking of parties, we live right next to the biggest party school in Qingdao--that's right, it is known as the Party School of Qingdao city. Despite the austere appearance and sleek black cars we see constantly entering the main gate, Dan and I think we might stop on a friday night to see if they have any nice keggers going on.

Speaking of other things, I often talk about how cheap everything in China is, and to a great extent, that is true. China in most respects has a much lower cost of living. Yet at the same time, China isn't THAT cheap, and it gets more expensive all the time. For example, although I buy cheap clothes, they are respectively not that much cheaper than the clothes I buy in America. I shop in the bargain bins and second hand clothing stores in America; I shop in the bargain bins (or as Dan pointed out, I bargain furiously) in China too. (They don't have any second hand clothing stores in China, no one really wants to wear clothes of possibly dead people, and probably not clothes that some person would want to throw away. Also, people seem to wear the clothes they have pretty well, I couldn't even imagine how worn out any second hand clothing would be). In some ways, buying a 6 dollar sweater in China isn't all that different from buying a 6 dollar sweater in America: people are pretty amazed that you could get a sweater that cheap. The main difference of course is that a six dollar sweater in China will be new and from a slightly nicer place than a 6 dollar sweater in America. In fact, there are plenty of opportunities to spend loads of money on things, especially in the ritzy area around our school. There is a Prada and a Louis Vuitton store; there is an expensive Japanese mall with western shops like Esprit; there is an even more expensive mall a couple of blocks away selling more designer wares; and there are many Korean boutiques and consigment shops catering to the large Korean expat community in our area (I heard that Koreans spend something like 22% of their household income on clothes. I don't know if that percentage is correct, but from what I've heard and seen on TV and real life, I can say it's probably very high). Of course, most Chinese people could not afford to shop in any of these stores. The average income in Qingdao is about 1000-1500 yuan a month ($175-$200). Even doctors make only around 3000 yuan a month. In fact, Dan and I earn about the same amount as a senior government bureaucrat would. That said though, there are also many Chinese businessmen who make high western salaries, and basically have money to burn, not to mention all the western expats earning western salaries and the scores of wealthy Koreans. For example, Dan and I frequently go to a Japanese-Korean restaurant near the school. It is quite expensive, except for the basic sushi which is a pretty good deal. Dan and I mainly just order the sushi, but often when we go there, we see people with platters of sushi, sashimi, teriaki, fish, beef, etc. One time, we saw a table of middle aged Korean men and women who were sitting around talking. They had probably about 8000 yuan ($1,000) of food in front of them: huge ice blocks of raw fish; sushi; basically everything on the menu, and none of them were touching any of the food. They just sat there talking and smoking and sipping cocktails. After about half and hour, one woman picked up a small piece of tuna with her chopstick, looked at it, and then put it on her plate. After about another half an hour, they left leaving the table heaping with food. Dan and our roommate and I wanted to run over and eat some, but instead we hoped the servers were able to get a good meal out of it.
That level of conspicuous consumption is somewhat extreme, but we do see similar things as well in bars and other posh places that cater to foreigners. It seems to me that China is an interesting country in that the gap between the upper middle class (people like me and Dan and doctors and lawyers etc.) and the truly wealthy business man is quite large. Of course, the gap between the middle class and the poor is also incredibly big. (And probably of more social concern).

so, again, it's been awhile since i have written, partially due to our computer troubles at home (mother, we do have broadband though, and they have free wireless access in most of the coffee shops), the trouble isn't so much our internet connection so much as the unreliable virus-ridden computer that we're using. teaching is going quite well, i have about 15 students in my adult class, and they're starting to warm up and get less shy about teaching english. i have one student who is especially friendly. she gives me a ride home after class every night in her leather interior peugeot. she gave me a ride home tonight, even though yesterday she had laser eye surgery. i asked her if it was okay to drive, and she shrugged off any concern. in class, she wore dark glasses and let me know that she wasn't really allowed to read, but she didn't think our textbook would be a problem. i guess laser eye surgery has progressed a lot in the last decade. anyways, this woman works for a bank near our school, and in several months will go on a business trip to germany, france, and england, where she must speak in english, so she decided to take my class. she keeps asking me what my favorite food is, so i hope that she will take me out or cook a chinese meal for me.

also today, i made my second attempt to join the library. even though china is an authoritarian country, the maddening arbitary bureaucracy rarely comes through in everyday life (well, at least my everyday life), but i guess i get my dose of it with the library. to join, one needs to bring to 1" photos, a photo idea, about 200 yuan ($24, most of which is a deposit which is returned to you when you turn in your card), and fill out two separate forms. the first time i forgot to bring photos, so i was rejected. (they did let me read magazines in the periodical room, though.) this time i came prepared, or so i thought. i had my photos and my international student id card, which has a photo of me. unfortunately, my card was not good enough, only my passport would work. after looking at my card number (they didn't even bother to look at the card) they merely said "bu xing" or "not acceptable," and no amount of pleading would get them to change their minds. again, they let me read in the periodical room, and i'll have to try again next time.