Letter: San ge yue (three months)

Dear Friends,

I've lived in China for three months, without catching SARS or even a mild case of food poisoning. If living in a foreign country is like learning to ride a bike, I think I'm at the stage where I wobble a lot but manage to keep my balance. Of course, wobbling is the fun part.

What is a country, anyway? It's people. In fact, nowhere is that more obvious than in China, since almost everything you do here involves dealing with people: collecting your wages, unlocking the door of a classroom, or using a photocopier. So I'm glad to say that I've made more friends than enemies here. I generally get along well with the people in my office, various functionaries at the school, and my students too. As for better-than-ordinary friends, there are my language exchange partners Jackie and Tie Cheng, and also a teacher from my office called Wang Xin.

The upshot of all this is that my feelings towards the country are mainly positive, even though a lot of my time here has been downright shitty. The job is to blame. The episodes in my web journal are moments of respite against a background of non-stop lesson preparation and assignment marking. I have to accept some of the blame for this myself, since the choices I've made about how to run my courses have sometimes inflated my workload. I must be looking forward to the end of the semester even more than the students are! But now there is the awful possibility, growing more and more likely every day, that the next victim of SARS will be our summer holiday. If the administration decides not to let the students return home over summer, then we will have to run classes for them during that time.

Sometimes I wish I was a student rather than a teacher. It would be nice having somebody telling me what to do during the lesson for a change. My spoken Chinese has improved bit by bit over the last few months, but I wish I could devote some real effort to studying the language. Nor am I happy to discover that three months is all it takes for my fingertips, callused from strangling a guitar, to become as smooth as a baby's situpon.

More free time, conversation, and a guitar. Is that all that I want? Where's my spirit of adventure, you might ask. You might say I'm like a mouse dropped on the floor who scurries under the nearest piece of furniture. But in fact, there is enough splendor in the small moments of life to sustain my curiosity. If culture is shared knowledge, then it includes everything from the number 13 to Aeroplane Jelly, and I've got 4000 years of details like that to catch up on.

Love Todd

http://www.waze.net/china/