She is here!

Guess what! She's here, in real life! Natu and his auntie have had an ongoing discussion about how things are supposed to be called.

Natu: Uma montanha!
Angie: What?
Natu: Uma montanha!
Angie: yeah, a mountain!
Natu: Uma casa na montanha!
Angie: What?
Natu: Otra casa!
Angie: What?

...

Angie: How many leaves?
Natu: Um, dois, três, cuatro, cinco. cinco leaves.
Angie: Six, seven,
Natu: seven, oito,
Angie: nine
Natu: ten!

...

Natu: Up! Down! Up! Down!
Angie: Shàng! Xià! Shàng! Xià!
Natu: No! It's: Up! Down! Up! Down!

There will be dancing

The US re-release of that acclaimed independently-produced thriller from China The Day of Angie and Lucien's Wedding is scheduled for its Stateside opening on August 1, 2009. The main event will take place approximately 7PM to 10PM, including good food, dancing, ceremonial cake cutting, and a fireworks grand finale courtesy of Sea World.

Who: Angie and Lucien and All of You
What: The Return of Angie and Lucien's Wedding
When: ca. 7PM ~ 10PM, August 1, 2009
Where: South Cove Beach on Vacation Isle, Mission Bay Park
Why: Angie is not a threat to national security
How: With your dancing shoes on, or barefoot

You will get a chance to RSVP by mail in a month or so, but RSVP by email or in the comments is just as good or better!

This post will be updated as plans develop.

Update:
Days Hotel on Hotel Circle has granted us a reduced rate, lower than the AAA rate.

The Standard room is one king bed or two queens (with a mini-fridge and microwave). The Kitchenette room is like the two-queen room, but with also a little two-burner stove, sink, and dishes. The parking is free for one car per room, but $10 for additional cars.

If you'd like something cheaper or nicer but still want to be nearby, there are lots of other hotels on Hotel Circle. But I hope you'll like this one -- it's highly rated, and a pretty good deal for the area.

Update 2:
The ceremony and reception will run 7-10 PM, but we will be hanging out at the park all day. You're welcome to come join us early if you can!

Driving directions: Coming from the north, get off the 5 at Garnet/Balboa. Right on Garnet or Grand 1.5 miles, left on Ingraham, then 1.5 miles to the entrance. Coming from the hotel, get off the 8 at W Mission Bay/Sports Arena, and turn right. Stay in the left lanes to end up on Ingraham, then 1 mile to the entrance. The parking lot at South Cove Vacation Isle (by the model boat pond) closes right at 10 PM, so it might be better to park on the south end of Ski Beach (on the other side of Ingraham), and follow the walkway under Ingraham. (See map)

It will be warm during the day, but there's lots of shade and a steady ocean breeze. Bring a sweatshirt or windbreaker for after the sun goes down.

We are privileged to have great friends and family who have already provided us with most everything we need. If you would still like to bring a gift, we welcome gift cards and such, but your participation with us at our celebration is itself gift enough. Thank you for coming!

YCQ #13 / New Years' Resolution

Since my time has expired this month, and my life has clearly been too boring to have anything to comment about, we now have what I know you all have actually been most hoping for: an all new episode of the Yellow Card Question Show!

Tuturuturu!

To make your life a little easier, I am also choosing your New Year's resolution for you. And today's theme song is also your New Year's resolution: Wear Sunscreen.


And now, the moment you've all been waiting for. With great gravity and ceremony, magnetism and antimony, I spin the stack and flip the wheel:


There were lots of good places to play when I was a kid. Wild grassy fields, big branchy trees, a lake for swimming and canoeing, clay hillsides and dirt drainage ditches. When I was living in this house:

there was a valley just off to the left there that had lots of entertainment. There was a small patch of jungle (including bird-of-paradise flowers, termites and cowkillers, porcupines, ...) and grassy little hill that we frequently had campouts on. I remember one summer (I think it must have been 1988) my friends and I must have camped out there several times in just a few weeks, and we got mad at our sisters when they did too, because they were copy-catting us. (A clear violation of childhood etiquette.) We also played a lot of tag and hide-and-seek games in that yard, and the bushes around the edge of the yard (gone now) were just the right height for jumping over. And when the wind was blowing good, you could stand at the edge of the hill and lean really far into it, especially if you tied a sheet to your ankles and grabbed the other two corners with your hands.

When we lived in this house:

we were a lot closer to the lake, and the neighbors had a canoe we could borrow. I spent a lot of time out in that canoe during the summertime. For some reason I can't articulate, it was particularly fun to be out when it was windy or rainy. That ditch in the foreground was also great for building a dirt city. Me and the neighbor kids made quite a town carved into the side of that ditch, with roads for matchbox cars, little lawns made of moss, and a couple high-rise buildings made of fresh mud. The brush and palm trees along the lake had parrots and cranes, boas and iguanas, and an occasional fox. In the lake we caught cool fish (mostly for the fish tank, since the largest ones were dogfish and piranhas, which generally had worms) and sometimes turtles. In the old days, there was a giant mango tree right in front of the house that was pretty good for climbing, and there was an even better one up the hill on the left.

There were so many different good places to play in those days, I think the best I can do is say that the whole area was my favorite.

A wedding like no other

On April Fools' Day 2007, I wrote a post about suddenly falling in love and getting hitched with a woman I met in a bar. I thought it was a pretty preposterous story considering I was the protagonist, but ultimately the joke was on me. Sometime in the prior month I had in fact met a woman at a bar, we did suddenly fall in love, and we are now married.


Our first impressions of each other were admittedly not great. I was cultivating my nerdy, girl-repellent look at that time, and when we were first introduced, her first words were "Do you wanna teach some English classes?", a line every native English speaker in China grows tired of hearing. But we ended up spending a couple days of our May holiday together, and I quickly realized I rather liked her. Besides her frankness and ease with strangers, she was pretty cute, clearly intelligent, culturally experienced, and unlike any woman I've known. It turned out all my friends already knew her, and everyone who knew her liked her. It took a little bit longer for her to figure out that I was a likeable guy, but before long we were spending all our free time together.



I delayed my planned return to the States as long as possible, but trying hard to not follow in the footsteps of my Fool's Day alter ego who quit school, and not quite able to believe she really liked me that much, I went back to school in California, with a visit scheduled for my winter break. It turned out she actually was as stuck on me as I was on her, and by the time winter break came, we were making marriage plans.




Marriage plans are a little complicated when the partners have lives on separate continents. It's taking a while, and still isn't done. It won't be official until after her visa process finishes, which looks now like it will be a few months more. But last month my parents came to visit, and we celebrated with her friends and family here, in a wedding sui generis, including scenic mountain views, fireworks, dancing, a bonfire, and lots of super people all having fun together.

It's almost February

of 2008. And I haven't said anything for far too long. But I have been having a fairly uneventful life, with little worth commenting on. I mean besides finishing my first quarter in the new program, seeing my sister for the first time in two years, meeting her fiance, going to their wedding, doing Christmas with the whole family, flying across the ocean to see my sweetie, getting engaged, coming back to school late, getting a bad stomach flu, then having my compy die on me, and having an impromptu whole family reunion last weekend, there hasn't been much happening with me. And most of my readers already know about those things anyway.

P.S. You may have noticed that I've moved this blog to my own domain. I'm also now running a proxified version (echo.discurs.us/fieldandgarden) so friends in China can see it without a proxy setup. (Yay!)

Home Again Home Again, Jiggity Jog

In the past four weeks, I have slept in eight cities, and ridden buses, metros, trains, a bullet train, a motorcycle, a rental car, a moto taxi, a few regular taxis, airplanes, and several cars of friends and family. And I walked a lot too. It was very good to see everyone, and it is good to be back.

I celebrated Chinese New Year, Carnaval, and President's Day in Los Angeles with my family. In my family, whenever these three important holidays fall on the same weekend, rather than trying to dance half-naked in the street, lighting firecrackers and waving American flags, we just sit around filling out income tax forms and taking turns holding the baby.

Now I have returned to Jinhua, where they are hanging red paper lanterns and shooting off fireworks to celebrate my birthday. It's very thoughtful of them.

Change of Plans

I have decided to make an emergency run home during my one month winter break. I need to meet with the professors at next year's school options, get out of the country, and see my people. I need a hug and, most importantly, a burrito!

I hope the following isn't misunderstood, and doesn't offend. Much of it is generalizations that should perhaps be more carefully qualified. I have a corresponding list in progress of things I like about living in China, but I'm pretty sure I will have an easier time thinking of those things when I'm in California. (The grass is always greener.) You can expect to see that list in a month or so. What is more relevant at the moment is my list of things I don't like about living in China:

• I have no peer group. I have only weak social groups. I have no roommates. I miss human contact.
• I have had very little time to practice Chinese. Relatively little context to speak, and for much of the semester I was too busy to study.
• I also managed to not do any other things I had hoped to explore here, like classical painting, martial arts, ancient Buddhism or Daoism.
• There are very few natural areas to visit. The roads are paved, the fields are plowed under (though mostly by hand), the lakes are artificial, and the rivers are polluted.
• The historical sites are reconstructions, with almost nothing remaining more than 20 years old.
• The assumption that dating Chinese women is a high priority for me, even a major reason for coming here. I can understand why this stereotype exists, since there are a lot of single men who come here as teachers or on business, and many of them do have Chinese girlfriends. And some of them, even one I know, have dislikable attitudes towards Chinese women. The effect is that I, as a representative white male American, am assumed to have similar intentions. The combination of that and being an exotic species makes me the object of some somewhat annoying attention, and some dislike.
• The media control is real, with pretty limited variety on TV. The news seems to be even less trustworthy than Fox or BBC Science. (And much less sensational/interesting).
• The nationalism and patriotism turn up in surprising places. It's sometimes just quaint, but other times like fingernails on a chalkboard. As far as I can tell, there is no stigma against nationalism. (Contrast this to Mexico City, where the relevant question being discussed was "Is nationalism ever a good thing?" if I remember correctly.)
• People assume that I like Bush and his policies, and that I'm nationalistic too.
• The Great Firewall blocks a lot of content: wikipedia, many blog and website hosts, many news sources, and many random pages. And it dramatically slows down international traffic too. It makes it harder to connect with friends and family in the States, read different perspectives on the news, and read academic articles. The internet connection is pretty poor when school is in session, and really bad in the evening.

I'm hoping I will be able to make some changes on some of these points next semester, and getting out of the country will help refresh my memory of what I do like about being here.

Top 10 Reasons For Not Updating Your Blog

10. An earthquake has shut down the internet, and it's painfully slow to access the blog authoring page. (News saying the internet is back to normal is an evil lie. It is better than a weak ago, but still very slow.)
9. Most of the things you might like to post about involve showing photos, which, due to said internet freeze, cannot be uploaded.
8. End-of-semester crunch time.
7. You're still looking for a license plate that ends "000".
6. You're still working on compiling your New Year's resolutions.
5. You need to wash your hair.
4. As a white heterosexual male native-English-speaking college graduate of US citizenship and Protestant upbringing, you're feeling self-conscious about drowning out less privileged voices and contributing to cultural hegemony.
3. Now that Time Magazine has made you, as an internet content producer, the 2006 Person of the Year, you feel you can rest on your laurels and seek self-fulfillment in some other arena, kind of like Yasser Arafat did after he was made 1993 Person of the Year as a peacemaker.
2. You are feeling disillusioned about your blog-posting abilities, comparing your 100 posts in three years to your sister's 200 posts in one year.
1. You've decided there's no better way to annoy your sister (short of flying back to visit her and tapping her on the shoulder unceasingly.)

Free Hugs

This video makes me happy.
With the low resolution it looks a lot like Patiunky, and I can totally imagine him doing something like this, even if it is somewhat at odds with his current YouTube persona.

Apparently the Free Hugs Campaign has quickly spread all over the world, though it is having difficulty some places. In China, for example, hugging counts as inappropriate public display of affection, and it's considered a foreign custom, too. Oh well.

新的习惯

我是英语老师，我的英文课之两门是写作课。我告诉了那个学生，常常用英文为交际写是很有用的习惯。还有，我让他们日志的作业，每个星期用英文写一页。

我的中文名字是“力行”，有“身体力行”的意思，是说，内容说的话努力实践。因为我应该练习写汉语，所以我每个星期用中文写一件文章。因为我的中文很差，我不能写那么长的文章，但是跟小的开始，越来越长，我希望能学会写不错的中文文章。

我家人都不会看中文看得懂，我要让他们看得懂我的话。所以我翻译到英文。因为我也想练习西班牙语，我也到西班牙语翻译我的文章。这样可以做平行的语言资料库。

Soy profesor de inglés, y dos de mis clases de inglés son clases de escritura. Les dije a aquellos estudiantes que escribir en inglés a menudo por communicación es hábito muy bueno. Además, les di tarea de escribir un diario en inglés, una página cada semana.

Mi nombre chino es "Lixing", que refiere a un modismo "cuerpo trabajar duro". Es decir, haga esfuerzos si mismo según lo que predique. Porque yo tambien debo practicar escribir chino, voy a escribir un ensayo en chino cada semana. Porque mi chino falta mucho, no puedo escribir un ensayo tan largo, pero con empezar pequeño y lentamente seguir mas largo, espero que pueda aprender a escribir ensayos buenos.

Mi familia no pueden entender chino, y quiero dejarles entender mis palabras. Entonces, voy a traducir a inglés. Porque también quiero practicar español, voy a traducir mis ensayos a español tambien. En esa manera puedo hacer un pequeño corpus lingüístico paralelo.

I'm an English teacher, and two of my English classes are writing classes. I told those students that frequent writing in English for communication is a very good habit. In addition, I gave them homework of writing a journal in English, one page a week.

My Chinese name is "Lixing", which refers to the maxim "body work hard", meaning diligently practice what you preach. Because I also need to practice Chinese, I'm going to write a post in Chinese each week. Because my Chinese is pretty limited, I can't write a very long essay, but by starting small and slowly writing longer, I hope I can learn to write decent Chinese posts.

My family can't read chinese, and I want to let them understand my words, so I will translate into English. Because I also want to practice Spanish, I will also translate into Spanish. This way I can make a small parallel linguistic corpus.