Ni-Hao, Abby!: Back to Blogging!

I am finally recovering from the swine flu of colds, which has held me hostage for the last two weeks. I didn’t spike a fever and did produce lots of phlegm, so it was just a cold, but I think the air pollution here had already done a number on my lungs, so I sounded like a consumptive in her last gasps. Actually, I even went and looked up the symptoms for whooping cough, though I’d been vaccinated for it. So that’s why there has been no bloggage—I hope I haven’t lost all my readers with my long silence!

The cold did give me a chance to hear lots of Chinese theories about health. The Chinese take herbal medicines and the properties of food very seriously. I swear that every food has some particular property—you’ll be innocently eating your chestnuts and someone’s like, “oh that’s excellent for a woman’s right toenail.” I think the Chinese could even come up with the health benefits of rancid fat—tonight at dinner, my friend Nancy was talking about wine and she said, well, it’s not very good for you, but a little is good fro you because it helps the circulation of blood.”

So here’s what I’ve learned about colds. Despite the name, colds result from an excess of fire in the body—I have been suffering from Shang Hoa-la, or fiery organ discomfort. So I should stay away from hot foods, of course, and seafood (well, I have a split jury on that one—Lotus, who was our liaison during the conference told me I should stay away from seafood, but my friend Maggie, who knows Lotus from school and says I shouldn’t trust her because she is an awful cook who always makes things too healthy swears that seafood is just what I need.) Cold drinks are the devil—people really looked at me as if I were mainlining heroin—and juice is not good, though fruit is OK. Pears are the big winners because they are supposed to be good for lungs. My friend Jane made me stewed pears (which must be made with crystallized, not granulated sugar) and quizzed me every day on if I was eating pears. She and Nina also took me to the campus doctor who prescribed a Chinese herbal medicine. It didn’t seem to do much good—nor did the Robitussin, Sudafed, or Benadryl—but it did taste quite pleasant and I got about a gallon, for 40 yuan, or $6 (which included a consultation with the doctor). Jane and Nina were scandalized by the price.

By the way, I realize I keep typing “my friend…” which is redundant and makes me sound like a four year old telling about her day at school, but I’m just trying to indicate that these are newish people is my life who I have been hanging out with. By the way, all of the above are Chinese, but I call them by their English names.

D.C. (during cold) I went to the “First Sino-USA Forum on English, Web and Education.” It was being held by a school that UIndy is establishing a relationship with, so we were honored guests. Let me just say this. At American conferences, you get a muffin. At The Sino-USA Forum, you get this:

yes, that's a pearl necklace. And they're real. I'm a jewish woman--I know how to check!

The flowers by the way, were presented to us by students at the school. The Chinese participants got to take the bus in to where the opening ceremonies were actually being held, but we “American experts” had to stop at the gate and get assigned a student who gave us a boquet and then followed us around for the rest of the weekend. Several years ago, I had a student, in her resume for W231, write that she went to some student conference where she “discovered white privilege.” I can only think she attended a conference thrown in China. (To be fair, the president of the school that organized this is known for really liking to put on a show—I don’t think this conference was typically Chinese. We have one coming up at NIT, so I’ll report back). I actually gave a keynote there—my qualifications for being invited were, I believe, the level of melanin in my skin—and as a result, got upgraded to dignitary for the closing ceremonies, when I had to sit on the stage with the vice Mayor of Shaoxing, the president of the University and assorted professors, and nod inanely at speeches in Chinese.

It was nice to meet other teachers though, both Chinese and English speaking (Yuexi, the university that hosted the conference is a foreign language college and has a lot of Australians and Brits teaching there) and hear some of the work others were doing. The banquets each night were also the bomb. I’ve described one banquet, and frankly there is so much food at any formal meal that the mind boggles. Here’s a picture I took from the banquet on night 2:

I may be somewhat blurring the meals, but that night, as always, there were cold plates on the lazy susan when we arrived: always sliced roast duck (with its little head staring at you), seaweed, tofu, cucumber slices, dried fish, and chicken’s feet, and often pickled radish (Chinese radishes are huge), maybe pickled eggs...that’s just the starters. This restaurant also had a big basket with roasted corn and sweet potatoes in the middle. Then the hot dishes start—whole fish, stewed with veggies and chicken’s feet; crabs stir fried with ginger and scallions; whole shrimp; a whole fried fish with a sweet and sour sauce; turtle stew (it’s so funny—I learned the word for turtle—uhgway—when I went to a temple and saw a bunch sunning themselves, cemented it in my mind because I spent a class teaching about the turtle in a chapter of The Grapes of Wrath and then cemented it by eating turtle, which is tasty and surprisingly beefy); chunks of beef stir fried with ginger; several soups, chicken, and one night with fish bellies (yum); stir fried vegetables, heavy on a sort of sweet tuber; lobster; chinese greens; an absolutely incredible custard made with some sort of shellfish; tiny little bivalves with soy and ginger….I know I’m missing a few dishes. You know the meal is finally ending when they bring fruit—which you should be way too full to eat. Oh, in Shaoxing, they also always ended the meal with a noodle soup, which I have no idea how anyone managed to find room for, though I guess by Chinese standards we hadn’t had a meal yet since we hadn’t had a starch. We also had a Shaoxing specialty each night—wu gan cai, or black preserved vegetables. It looked like a fungus of some sort to me, though I was later told it was bits of bamboo. The bits were indeed black, salty, a bit sweet and chewy—they were served with steamed wheat buns, and you ate them sort of like a sandwich.

After dinner that night we went on a cruise. Shaoxing, a 4000 year old city, is filled with canals and bridges, and is the Venice of China. Except that Suzhou is also the Venice of China, so there you have it. And considering that these cities way outdate Venice, shouldn’t Venice be the Shaoxing of Italy? Just saying…Anyway, we got into a long, flat bottomed boat and wended our way down the canals. Apparently the vice-mayor had specially ordered the lights to be turned on—all the bridges have different colored lights strung along them and trained under them—so it was quite the sight. As a side note, I love how the Chinese light up buildings at night—big buildings all have light effects like the ones from Shanghai, and lots of smaller places are lined with strings of light. Here are some pictures from our cruise—the first one is actually just outside of the restaurant where we ate—it was in a park with lots of streams and bridges, and buildings edged with lights

On Sunday they took us sight-seeing. Shaoxing is famous for Lu Xun, China's greatest twentieth century writer. This is a statue of him from Ming Ren Wang Chun, or Famous People square.

Shaoxing is also the birth place of Zhou Enlai

, who played a major role in the founding of New China (he was prime minister for a long time) and who many Chinese really admire as the real intellectual and philosopher of the movement. This is from the wall at Ming Rem....

Further back in time, Shaoxing was the homeplace of Dae Yu, the third king or so of Ancient China.Dae is notable for his spirit of self sacrifice: he didn't see his family for over three years when he worked to save shaoxing from flooding (he apparently moved huge amounts of land from the mountain). Here he is on the wall and as a huge statue at the top of the local mountain: