My classes, because I do actually go to class here

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First of all, I love my Chinese class (the one I have for two hours M-Thursday). And my god I really feel like I am getting so much better. And it's all happening so fast. We spent all of yesterday's class having a debate. Because I've finally learned how to become a slacker here when it comes to doing my work (I never thought this was possible, but I've learned how my brother does it, and now I'm pretty much putting in the minimum amount of time at home I need to to complete my assignments. And its weird because I am on the one hand motivated to do my Chinese work cause it is so relevant and I love the language, but it's never as fun as hanging out in the apartments and watching our pirated dvds or anything else we might be doing at night), I didn't spend a moment preparing for the debate before class. This week we were studying winning the lottery, becoming rich, and Chinese fortune and superstitions (actually really interesting, I'll get to that later), and the topic for the debate (in Chinese, of course) was "If you won the lottery, would it bring you happiness?" I argued (in Chinese): Yes.
I knew the topic and what side I would be taking and I had meant to look up a few "key word" in my dictionary, but I even forgot to do that. Anyway, the debate was great because 1) I always come alive during debates, 2) but that is really besides the point. The point is that without having anything prepared, I was able to make my points, understand what the other side was arguing, and respond on the spot to them. All in Chinese. Which means that my mind was working and thinking in Chinese and using all of the new vocab I had learned and thinking back on the grammar rules I had been taught back to my first semester, and combining it all together so that I was able to express coherent thoughts and get my opinion and arguments across. And it was fast paced and it was fun and it felt fabulous! That had to have been my best moment in Chinese class so far. And it was the best speaking practice I could imagine - for once I didn't have notes, and hadn't gone over my oral argument with my tutor, so it allowed me to see how good I was at using the language on the spot, and I was so proud that I was pretty much able to express complex arguments and say exactly what I wanted to say. Kind of like that time in the park, the feeling of grasping the Chinese language and knowing that I am truly able to communicate in it is exhilerating!!

So this week's lesson was really interesting and gave me some real insights into the Chinese culture. Our book's dialogue for this week was about a man who is getting a new phone number, and you wouldn't believe how involved the process of getting a phone number is here - not because it takes so damn long to get anything done, as is the case in London, but because the Chinese are so superstitous and the numbers and combination of numbers that appear in their phone numbers can be extremely lucky or unlucky. A phone number is considered to be unlucky if there are any 4's in it. That's because the word for four (si) sounds very much like the word for death, or to die (also si, but a different tone). The worst combination of all is to have a -514, because the pronunciation of the numbers sounds like if one were to say "I want you to die." While 4's are considered bad (we all checked our phone numbers after that, and it's not too surprising that quite a lot of 4's occur in the phone numbers of us foreigners - because we don't know to argue to try to get our number changed), 8's are considered to be the best, and so an ideal phone number would have a lot of 8's. That's because the pronunciation of the number 8 (ba) apparently sounds like the word for "to get rich" (fa). And there are more superstitous things like that, and from an outsiders perspective, they take it kind of far, to the point where the numbers and words don't actually sound very much like each other at all. But it's cool at the same time, too. The other thing I learned about Chinese culture this week, first from my roommate Jeanette, whose mom's side of the family all lives in Shanghai, and then my tutor talked to me about it, is about ancestor worship in modern day China. In the class I took at Rice on traditional Chinese culture, we spent a lot of the semester focusing on ancestor worship, and I was interested to learn the form that it still takes even today. This time of year (sometime between last week and the next 2 or 3 weeks), it is the custom for as many members of the family as possible to get together and spend a day visiting their ancestors graves. It's taken very seriously here, and when I asked my tutor about her weekend plans, she said she didn't know because of all of her friends would be occupied this weekend with visiting their ancestors. I thought this was interesting to learn about as well.

And I've been meaning to write briefly about my non-Chinese classes, particularly my area studies class on Chinese politics. I'm pretty sure that I haven't written about it yet because the class itself is the most boring class I've ever had to sit through. The professor has no visuals, no power points, and no real direction for the lecture, and just sits on a desk and says whatever comes to his mind for the full two hours. While it generally feels like an incredible waste of time, I was surprised at how frankly he talks about the subject matter of the course, which includes the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution (under Mao). Last week's lecture was on the Cultural Revolution, and I remember before I came on this program and when I was discussing with people (adults mainly, I remember having this conversation with my grandfather particularly) the fact that I would be taking a course in Chinese history in present day Communist China, where the media is still censored and books are still banned, it seemed like it could be a pretty bad idea, and that I may have to be critical of the entire content of the course. But last week's class made it clear that there is one huge advantage to taking this course here rather than in the states, and that is the fact that our professor actually lived through the Cultural Revolution. He was there and he experienced it and the stories he told recounting his memories about it - of his best friend's mother commiting suicide from the apartment above him, and of his father's disappearance for many years because he was a professor and he was therefore one of Mao's prime targets, and his own initial participation as a student in the anarchy of it all - profoundly affected my understanding of this period in Chinese history. In the same way that living here is making the language far more real to me, studying Chinese history in the place and from the people where it actually happened only a few decades ago is putting everything I've previously known about China into a new context. There's really no replacement for actually being here.

I just opened a card my dad sent me along with my camera, and in it he wrote a quote from March 20th's New York Times on the reason many of us travel far from home:
"To be competent under trying and unfamiliar conditions is to feel free."
Maybe this is why I feel that maybe I should, but I don't, feel homesick.

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