Technical Difficulties


People make jokes about what we call "The Great Firewall of China." Most of the time, I cannot view this blog, nor any of yours. I send posts via Dennis Cope, our good friend, who is pictured above with his wife Marie and his late dog, Maddie. I was briefly able to see the blogs today,but the system shut down when I tried to post. Google images and Gmail have also gone down.

Proxy-based software such as Freegate sometimes allows one to bypass Chinese information control. I learned about Freegate from a Chinese teenager last summer. Would it worked better.

Below: The dove, symbol of Freegate.

Campus Community

Chinese universities are communities in a different sense from their American counterparts. Most faculty and staff live on campus where they obtain housing at bargain rates. We ourselves are living in a modern faculty apartment, complete with washing machine, air conditioner, and big screen TV. There are cooking facilities, too, but everyone eats in the dining halls, at least some of the time. Often, the parents of faculty members live with their children and
take care of the grand kids.

In one section of campus, the trees are hung with blue, red and green lights-- don't ask me why. In the evenings, people come out and visit while the children play tag.

It's picturesque, but I wouldn't like living this way long term-- it would get claustrophobic to have all your colleagues as neighbors. This would be comparable to what our family experienced when Joe was in active ministry and the parsonage we lived in was right next to church. The Chinese expect far less privacy than we, though, and they take such arrangements for granted.






























Above 1st: Mother, grandmother and grandchild on an evening walk
Above 2nd: An evening game of tag.
Below: Sweethearts sharing breakfast

The Pause that Refreshes

Though it's changing in some places, many Chinese workers still take a nap in the middle of the day. Many people think it is essential to maintaining one's health. When I worked in Weihai, my students were apt to scold me for my habit of eating at my desk while grading papers midday. They maintained that especially at my advanced age, I should be home sleeping, or at the very least take a snooze in my office!















Above: a Chinese worker naps atop his bicycle.

Is txtng rlly bd 4 yr spllng?

Is texting really bad for your spelling? Probably not, according to the preliminary results of a study Dr. Karin Bartoscuk and I conducted recently.
Any teacher can tell you that students have problems with spelling. And today's students text all the time-- is there a connection?Chinese students text even more than students in the US. Phone calls are much more expensive than texts over here.

To determine if texting does affect English spelling, Karin and I
compared students who habitually text with a group of community members from my church who mostly do not. Both groups were given a questionnaire about their texting practices and a 30 item spelling test consisting of words anyone with a high school education is presumed to know.

The very preliminary results: most people got 17 out of 30 items
right. There was no difference between texters and non-texters,
between men and women, between old people and young people.



Some thoughts:
1. English spelling is difficult. Even native speakers have trouble with it.
2. People probably don't have trouble spelling because they confuse the conventions of ordinary
spelling with the forms used in texting. English spelling is tricky for everyone.

These results are preliminary. Karin is visiting family in Germany
this summer, and I'm here in China. We'll do more with the data when
we get back.

Likely some of you who are reading took part in the study. Our
sincerest thanks, and we'll keep you posted.

Dining Hall

It takes a long time to learn a new language, especially one so different from English as is Chinese, but we muddle through. This morning, the dining hall closest to our apartment was closed, and we had to locate another one. A group of students were standing nearby, but I could not think of the word for "dining hall," though I ought to have known the word 'shitang' from the "Communicate in Chinese" DVD's I've been studying. That's the problem: in conversation, one has to have instant recall. Fortunately, one of the students knew English and could direct us.

In the dining hall, we can point to the items we want and pay for them with our meal card. But this morning, we had to specify what we wanted to drink and were given two bowls of slimy rice and bean porridge when I thought we had asked for orange juice. Eventually, we obtained the desired beverage and paid for the porridge as well. I thought it not bad; Joe said that if I ordered it again, I should ask for only one bowl.

The dining halls are equipped with TV's, which students' rooms seldom are. Yesterday afternoon, a group of young men, crowded the dining hall to watch the game between the Los Angeles Lakers and Yao Ming's team, the Houston Rockets. When Houston scored, they stood on the chairs and cheered.





























Above: Scenes from a dining hall

On Being (Almost) Illiterate
In my work as a reading specialist, I sometimes encounter an adult who is almost entirely unable to read. When it comes to Chinese, Joe and I are practically illiterate, ourselves. Each of us can discriminate perhaps a hundred characters. To be functional in Chinese, you need a couple of thousand-- even more if you want to read a newspaper.

This weekend, we're on our own. The university has provided a meal plan and a very comfortable apartment, and campus is abloom with roses and flowering trees I cannot identify. We see interesting things on our walks. But we're exhausted. The trip here took over thirty-six
hours, during which we got almost no sleep.

This afternoon we slept 'til well after 7:00 PM, and the dining hall was closed. We would have to fix instant noodles for supper or go to a restaurant. Tired as we were, we were in no mood to use our broken Chinese, and the kids who work in restaurants on campus don't speak that much English. I groaned inwardly as I thought about trying to order a meal.

There are actually several restaurants on campus. We brightened when we noticed that one of them had pictures as well as words on its menu. We just had to point at the items we wanted, a useful strategy when one is on campus.






























Above: Scenes from on campus and nearby.
Below: A restaurant menu with words and pictures.
Second below: Joe having dinner

The many faces of culture shock









Culture shock is "a state of bewilderment and distress experienced by an individual who is suddenly exposed to a new, strange, or foreign social and cultural environment" (Dictionary.com). What the formal definition leaves out is the many ways this bewilderment plays itself out. In addition to confusion, culture shock can show itself as irritability, suspiciousness, or fear.

When we arrived a couple of days ago, I could access my blog. Then abruptly, my blog was cut off-- I could neither see it, nor post. This has happened before when I visited China, a function of their information control, people say. Our dear friend Dennis Cope is doing the postings, which I send him via my Gmail. It's a nuisance not seeing it, but I knew to expect the problem.

Then today, I could get on the Internet. I have several email accounts, but none took my password. Joe couldn't access his either. Our passwords kept being rejected. I tried changing the password on my yahoo account, but it didn't help. I phoned the aide at International Programs, a lovely young man who calls himself "William." But when I reached him, he was climbing the Great Wall of China with a number of other visitors and could not determine the problem over the phone. There was no one else I could ask.

Email is my lifeline to the US. With it, I communicate with my office, keep track of my family, check on the well-being of my cats. Not to having it makes me panicky and suspicious.

While no one would describe me as a virulent anti-Communist; I do possess some predictable American attitudes toward the political system here. I imagined my blog had offended some Chinese official and my access email had been revoked. I wondered what would happen to me and my husband. Less troubled than I, Joe suggested we visit a grocery store, since we were out of orange juice. Then Joe disappeared in one of the aisles, and I imagined he'd been arrested. Suddenly, I remembered we had not registered with the American Embassy-- something American visitors to China should do. It was only when I discovered my husband scrutinizing labels on Chinese snack foods did I begin to consider that I might be overreacting.

Back at the apartment, I discovered did some research and learned that my Yahoo account was not taking cookies. I tried to change the settings, but I had trouble because here, toolbar directions come up in Chinese. I monkeyed around with things using a Chinese/English
dictionary, but had no luck.

I don't know how Joe did it, but he figured out we needed to lower security settings, and so we're back in touch with the world. It's my fifth visit to China, but I'm still not immune to culture shock.