.
Friday, November 28, 2008
oh. i almost forgot...
a picture post!
all of these are from my roommate's twenty-first birthday (and her camera). we had to do something special because here we've seen six year-olds buying booze. special means luxuries from home that are luxurious and decadent or that are very difficult to procure. this is REAL french red-wine, cheese that isn't carrot-flavored, crackers, and imported dark chocolate. also throw in some toffee and chocolate-covered macadamia nuts a classmate's mom sent.
i don't know how i always luck out with the best roommates.
the evening begins with a fine italian tiramisu made out of sliced white bread, powdered cocoa, and whipped cream.
this is the same naked female cake from above that i assembled from various cheaps around town. paper, gluttonous rice cakes, and some strange strawberry jam vagina cake--the seed of all my perverted ideas--that i really don't know what to call other than vagina cake. okay, vulva cake. roast beef...
if everyday you talk about the "vagina cake" that you see in the neighborhood bakery window nobody else wants to try it but you.
but i can make you admire it...
so b-day cake is only a little bit prepubescent. blue cheese at armpit o'clock.
so some talking happens at parties.
and after a little bit of wine, a brave soul finally steps up to the cake...
a mammogramy also happens.
and then the bed is vanquished for its platform. dancin' platform!
some modeling shots happen.
ones with water cooler shrines...
ones in the laundry room...
and on it's floor...
birthday girl is really happy by this point. goal complete.
morning after.
a picture post!
all of these are from my roommate's twenty-first birthday (and her camera). we had to do something special because here we've seen six year-olds buying booze. special means luxuries from home that are luxurious and decadent or that are very difficult to procure. this is REAL french red-wine, cheese that isn't carrot-flavored, crackers, and imported dark chocolate. also throw in some toffee and chocolate-covered macadamia nuts a classmate's mom sent.
i don't know how i always luck out with the best roommates.
the evening begins with a fine italian tiramisu made out of sliced white bread, powdered cocoa, and whipped cream.
this is the same naked female cake from above that i assembled from various cheaps around town. paper, gluttonous rice cakes, and some strange strawberry jam vagina cake--the seed of all my perverted ideas--that i really don't know what to call other than vagina cake. okay, vulva cake. roast beef...
if everyday you talk about the "vagina cake" that you see in the neighborhood bakery window nobody else wants to try it but you.
but i can make you admire it...
so b-day cake is only a little bit prepubescent. blue cheese at armpit o'clock.
so some talking happens at parties.
and after a little bit of wine, a brave soul finally steps up to the cake...
a mammogramy also happens.
and then the bed is vanquished for its platform. dancin' platform!
some modeling shots happen.
ones with water cooler shrines...
ones in the laundry room...
and on it's floor...
birthday girl is really happy by this point. goal complete.
morning after.
Labels: china, hen hao wanr, love, pictures lots, shouldn't be posting this
¶ 11/28/2008 07:46:00 PM 2 Comments
electronic communication via second story dungeon
got my usuals 'round me: left has greasy black hair routed by eight sparkly disco-colored colored hair clips, and lacking the firm straight-foward gaze of regulars; in front two boys crowaed around a computer debating something interesting, i'm afraid if i were to sneek a peek at the computer sceen i'd find the chinese knock-off world of warcraft; behing me two young men watching a chinese war movie--wouldn't they all be about mao?
i'm officially done with work for the SIT program, although we still have two more weeks. i feel that my chinese communication is rapidly improving and that i'm able to get around without stumbling. i'm able to describe things that i want without using hand gestures and put together simple grammar structures in impromptu situations to convey what is on the tip of my english tongue.
bought mom and dad christmas presents today with some of the money dad gives me for every semester. i think it will be like this until i get out of school. they want what i bought.
i've gained fifteen pounds this semester. they don't joke around when they say you gain weight during study abroad. especially females. they told me i'd gain that freshmen fifteen, but i never did. i suppose i'm making up for that now.
i'm applying to study at yunnan university for the school year of 2009-2010. yes, that will be after i graduate. but, the tuition in china is very cheap; word of mouth tells me half or less the cost of in-state tuition. anyways, i want to reach a certain level before i enter the working world in china. conversational is ideal. i can have conversation with my chinese teachers, but i don't think that counts for much. they know what i'm attempting to express by knowing the words they teach. as we say in chinese "dun dun dun [etc etc etc]".
that's about it. i had more to write but i've been busy doing things all day. cleaning, getting tests finished, buying necessitites, thinking i had a dinner date that is really tommorow...
tis my life!
i'm officially done with work for the SIT program, although we still have two more weeks. i feel that my chinese communication is rapidly improving and that i'm able to get around without stumbling. i'm able to describe things that i want without using hand gestures and put together simple grammar structures in impromptu situations to convey what is on the tip of my english tongue.
bought mom and dad christmas presents today with some of the money dad gives me for every semester. i think it will be like this until i get out of school. they want what i bought.
i've gained fifteen pounds this semester. they don't joke around when they say you gain weight during study abroad. especially females. they told me i'd gain that freshmen fifteen, but i never did. i suppose i'm making up for that now.
i'm applying to study at yunnan university for the school year of 2009-2010. yes, that will be after i graduate. but, the tuition in china is very cheap; word of mouth tells me half or less the cost of in-state tuition. anyways, i want to reach a certain level before i enter the working world in china. conversational is ideal. i can have conversation with my chinese teachers, but i don't think that counts for much. they know what i'm attempting to express by knowing the words they teach. as we say in chinese "dun dun dun [etc etc etc]".
that's about it. i had more to write but i've been busy doing things all day. cleaning, getting tests finished, buying necessitites, thinking i had a dinner date that is really tommorow...
tis my life!
Labels: busy, i n t o the future, she's got ideas, stuff, words
¶ 11/28/2008 07:02:00 PM 0 Comments
Monday, November 17, 2008
postcards for the taking
if you'd like a postcard, please leave me your address in the comment section--i love sending them.
¶ 11/17/2008 03:39:00 PM 0 Comments
Sunday, November 16, 2008
banning of gay marriage in california
it's unfathomable to me why people would consider banning a certain group of human beings from marriage. i mean, i've heard the arguments several times, but they all condense down into personal beliefs.
i'm in china now and this entry coming is a little bit off topic, but it's genuinely saddening to me. to quote some new york times article, "in a blue state in an overwhelmingly blue period of time," it's amazing that people can vote blue for evening disparities, in theory, while condemning and exaggerating others.
this isn't a matter of what one t h i n k s is right or not, it's a human thing. i just don't g e t it. i don't even get when somebody says "it's not that i would vote against gay marriage, it just isn't important". i know that this is a hot-button issue, but if we were to as a nation realize that marriage for all couples is something INEVITABLE, and that we can't avoid denying somebody something so unjustly forever, as inevitably enough people cared to legally make black people equal to white people, than we can be sparred from this hype and ridiculous, time-wasting dialogue.
i'm in china now and this entry coming is a little bit off topic, but it's genuinely saddening to me. to quote some new york times article, "in a blue state in an overwhelmingly blue period of time," it's amazing that people can vote blue for evening disparities, in theory, while condemning and exaggerating others.
this isn't a matter of what one t h i n k s is right or not, it's a human thing. i just don't g e t it. i don't even get when somebody says "it's not that i would vote against gay marriage, it just isn't important". i know that this is a hot-button issue, but if we were to as a nation realize that marriage for all couples is something INEVITABLE, and that we can't avoid denying somebody something so unjustly forever, as inevitably enough people cared to legally make black people equal to white people, than we can be sparred from this hype and ridiculous, time-wasting dialogue.
Labels: intensity, news, shock
¶ 11/16/2008 02:00:00 PM 0 Comments
when you're somewhere in china and an old fat white man is the only one near you mumbling softly to himself you must put your headphones on. it doesn't matter if you are actually listening to anything, or if they are even plugged in--a technique i proudly invented while riding the tacoma-parkland public buses--but you must wear them to avoid the creepy, unshakeable conversation that will assuredly ensue. in china, single-traveling white men in general should be avoided. especially if they are from the united states.
do you want a hint why?
please visit the craigslist.org, beijing for example, men looking for women section.
enough said.
on my way here this morning i was reminded of something to y'all, my lovely readers. i suppose it's more of a hypothesis than an actual existing phenomenon. the evidence is in the money-spendin' teenagers and techno-vibrating hair salons. walking down streets from beijing to kunming to even rural shaxi, teenagers sport frizzed drugged out mullets, lots of hair spray or gel--can't combine 'em--and leather jackets with lots of silver buttons, studs, and, all girls can't even go on an evening walk without five-inch heels. i know i wasn't around really in the eighties, but this economy boom, the soft jazz and celine dion heard everywhere, and hair salons like tuzi propagating a coherent unified disastrous step out of the Clueless period into...
i'm afraid,
really,
that china is going backward in time
into...
the eighties!
it needs to claim all the decades it missed during mao.
in fifteen years they'll hit the industrial revolution in full force!
be scared.
i know the u.s. already is.
L.A. is blaming all of its air pollution on china drifts.
do you want a hint why?
please visit the craigslist.org, beijing for example, men looking for women section.
enough said.
on my way here this morning i was reminded of something to y'all, my lovely readers. i suppose it's more of a hypothesis than an actual existing phenomenon. the evidence is in the money-spendin' teenagers and techno-vibrating hair salons. walking down streets from beijing to kunming to even rural shaxi, teenagers sport frizzed drugged out mullets, lots of hair spray or gel--can't combine 'em--and leather jackets with lots of silver buttons, studs, and, all girls can't even go on an evening walk without five-inch heels. i know i wasn't around really in the eighties, but this economy boom, the soft jazz and celine dion heard everywhere, and hair salons like tuzi propagating a coherent unified disastrous step out of the Clueless period into...
i'm afraid,
really,
that china is going backward in time
into...
the eighties!
it needs to claim all the decades it missed during mao.
in fifteen years they'll hit the industrial revolution in full force!
be scared.
i know the u.s. already is.
L.A. is blaming all of its air pollution on china drifts.
Labels: china, random, she's got ideas, words
¶ 11/16/2008 12:28:00 PM 0 Comments
Saturday, November 15, 2008
who doesn't like pictures?
i thought about if i would ever run for president or not. chances are probably not. so i was able to post some pictures.
most pictures are courtesy of courtney, the girl lying next to me in the first picture. if you go to her blog, you can thank her if you want. she and her roommate have given me most of the pictures i've passed onto the fam and friends by email. thanks, guys.
laying in grounds of tibetan temple
same tibetan temple. sunny day
hotspringing regardless of wet underwear
in the Kunming Minority University Olympic Games opening athletes march. weren't participating in the sports, doesn't matter, apparently again everybody loves a foreigner
tibetan temple near tibet
dancin'
all the girls of the trip minus one blonde-headed
girls that i steal pictures from
.
most pictures are courtesy of courtney, the girl lying next to me in the first picture. if you go to her blog, you can thank her if you want. she and her roommate have given me most of the pictures i've passed onto the fam and friends by email. thanks, guys.
laying in grounds of tibetan temple
same tibetan temple. sunny day
hotspringing regardless of wet underwear
in the Kunming Minority University Olympic Games opening athletes march. weren't participating in the sports, doesn't matter, apparently again everybody loves a foreigner
tibetan temple near tibet
dancin'
all the girls of the trip minus one blonde-headed
girls that i steal pictures from
.
Labels: china, pictures lots, travel
¶ 11/15/2008 05:35:00 PM 0 Comments
i'm at a french cafe in southern banshee land china using the internet somewhere besides the dim sewers of used,reused keyboards schlacked by meaty-oiled finger tips, air canceled out by cigarettes and the inhuman needs of virtual white-skinned, well-muscled, killing machines lusting for that next level up. level up, but not level out. everyday or the days that i can stand it i sit next to greasy heads crooning necks bent like drugged-up vultures leaning eversoaring toward the shining plugged-in suns. people who could, in real life, thousands of miles of way, be heroic comrades of the famous, "shuai [Chinese idea of handsome]" Squall or Kino himself living nights 3, 4 am that push away the drudgeries of having to step into that honest, omnipresent sunlight above and out that has nurtured romance and shame and disappointment and competition and your freewill for billions of real life tales.
or simply said, a strong-headed life--even simpler, a kin--that hasn't learned the art of appeasement, or reconciled it within such a good-hearted, optimistic, romantic, true philosophy.
now i sit here typing because i really just want to read about the love life of a friend. internet isn't dependable. the chinese woman across from me ordered chinese friend vegetables and a mound of rice. i think she is an idiot.
do you order chicken fingers, frenchfries, meatloaf, or a hamburger at a mexican restaurant?
how about filet minon sunning her belly under the heat lamps at the willowbrook mall?
i don't think so. my stomach has been incubating something rotten for a few days. i know because i catch a raft of it stubbornly floating along the leaking wafts that manage to erupt, only every so often, out of those unmanageable orifices. something genuinely sour, i tell you. decomposing. perhaps the absurd amount of meat foodstuffs i ate in houston a few months ago. oh, how i'd like to blindly believe that nice idea. instead i will admit and be defeated to discontinue my visits to the cheap of all cheap mecca of eats (lunch, 30 cents; dinner, 40) because i can only ignore the blatant for my psychological health for so long. (unfortunatly always a step into too long.) the physical is always the last and most important. keeps those up in the sky on the ground. thank god.
when i was little i always wished i would be able to be impermeable to physical hurt. chris was always wiser at the three-wishes game, among three he always said, even at age five or six; "i want to be able to speak to everybody in the world, to know every language ever made."
across the floor there is a huge fight going on in chinese. loudly crying and yelling. maybe trying to humiliate somebody else but in her absorption of her tiny realm of dealings and own histrionic vanity, she doesn't realize that she is ruining everybody's peace. people when they're like that and so vindicated don't realize that their target isn't the one who looks stupid, but themselves.
not making fun, of course. been there, done that. if i don't know from experience, i've learned from others' experiences.
still, as insignificant as it is, i still wish i knew enough chinese to discern what it is that upsets her.
or simply said, a strong-headed life--even simpler, a kin--that hasn't learned the art of appeasement, or reconciled it within such a good-hearted, optimistic, romantic, true philosophy.
now i sit here typing because i really just want to read about the love life of a friend. internet isn't dependable. the chinese woman across from me ordered chinese friend vegetables and a mound of rice. i think she is an idiot.
do you order chicken fingers, frenchfries, meatloaf, or a hamburger at a mexican restaurant?
how about filet minon sunning her belly under the heat lamps at the willowbrook mall?
i don't think so. my stomach has been incubating something rotten for a few days. i know because i catch a raft of it stubbornly floating along the leaking wafts that manage to erupt, only every so often, out of those unmanageable orifices. something genuinely sour, i tell you. decomposing. perhaps the absurd amount of meat foodstuffs i ate in houston a few months ago. oh, how i'd like to blindly believe that nice idea. instead i will admit and be defeated to discontinue my visits to the cheap of all cheap mecca of eats (lunch, 30 cents; dinner, 40) because i can only ignore the blatant for my psychological health for so long. (unfortunatly always a step into too long.) the physical is always the last and most important. keeps those up in the sky on the ground. thank god.
when i was little i always wished i would be able to be impermeable to physical hurt. chris was always wiser at the three-wishes game, among three he always said, even at age five or six; "i want to be able to speak to everybody in the world, to know every language ever made."
across the floor there is a huge fight going on in chinese. loudly crying and yelling. maybe trying to humiliate somebody else but in her absorption of her tiny realm of dealings and own histrionic vanity, she doesn't realize that she is ruining everybody's peace. people when they're like that and so vindicated don't realize that their target isn't the one who looks stupid, but themselves.
not making fun, of course. been there, done that. if i don't know from experience, i've learned from others' experiences.
still, as insignificant as it is, i still wish i knew enough chinese to discern what it is that upsets her.
Labels: china, intensity, words
¶ 11/15/2008 04:03:00 PM 0 Comments
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
p.s.
yesterday i managed to manuever scanning documents in china. this is possibly a feat because it involved relatively obscure chinese vocabulary and a delicate balance of my artistic necessities and somebody else actually making them happen. it's difficult enough using photoshop by windows-language without tossing in an additional foreign one.
sorry about the hi-res. if you aren't with the times, hope this spamming of your connection will be yet another reminder. i'm picky and i draw delicate lines.
the christmas themed-art is, i suppose, an unintended hint to the entire fam of the yet-to-come.
i threw in a wide variety of things. sketches of lecturers in class (my notes), poisonous candy-wrappers (poisonuous candy eaten), moss (spanish-chinese?), and many drawings probably interpreted into intentions, but assuredly without.
artwork thus far in china:
except this one, which is my kunming host stay grandpa's, the one whom i wrote my essay about:
sorry about the hi-res. if you aren't with the times, hope this spamming of your connection will be yet another reminder. i'm picky and i draw delicate lines.
the christmas themed-art is, i suppose, an unintended hint to the entire fam of the yet-to-come.
i threw in a wide variety of things. sketches of lecturers in class (my notes), poisonous candy-wrappers (poisonuous candy eaten), moss (spanish-chinese?), and many drawings probably interpreted into intentions, but assuredly without.
artwork thus far in china:
except this one, which is my kunming host stay grandpa's, the one whom i wrote my essay about:
Labels: art, china, pictures lots
¶ 11/11/2008 03:37:00 PM 0 Comments
other half
In the middle of this dramatic portrayal of simple English and Chinese, bold gestures, and a heart still searching for some sort of divine expression to summarize this moment, to understand it by a lens looked through from people past and present who seek beautiful, repetitive relationships in many a thing and event, his daughter walked in past his soapbox to look at his life from the desk. With a queer smirk on her face, for she is never without a smile, she reads his toil quietly and interestedly; in the background YeYe still bounces, hollering simple English until he realizes that I'm absorbed in the act, the person much more spatially closer to me. Not to be withstood, he bends around his daughter with her hips and stomach against the back of the desk chair, underneath her leaning-over, her reading what she has probably heard in both different and similar phrases times before,.to regain his proper spot of the storyteller, the author, the experiencer. He begins to reread his writing, the same writing we've just elucidated through thirty minutes of sport, when his daughter quips in her theatric, over-enunciated, sickly sweet, i've-just-been-hit-in-the-jaw-and-we're-replaying-my-words-in-slow-motion Chinese, "Your YeYe is a very good Chinese writer." Her eyes are big and never seem to be searching for my response; possibly only the product of honed inherent patience. YeYe continues to read, making his speech louder, this act seeming to teleport her from whatever realm her considerations and heart lie, and she retorts, "haven't you said too much about politics? That gets boring. Tell her about your three lovers." For this, YeYe quiets, and stares at his page, perhaps thinking about what to say next, or thinking how to not say anything at all, but either way, both do the trick. His daughter takes this que and prattles into a much faster Chinese, a type of "hua [dialect of speech]" that doesn't have the mental capacity that the preoccupation of I'm-speaking-to-a-foreigner requires, and in doing so, by possibly a mix of shock and, regrettably, needing "foreigner Chinese," I am only able to understand parts of this aspect of YeYe.
His first lover, apparently--gleaned by words of "si, si, si [death, death, death]" and the much more decisive vocabulary of 'hand sliding horizontally across throat'--died by either murder or sickness during the cultural revolution. His second wife was hastily mentioned. Number two was her mother and currently absent from this large house of people. There was no talk about death or her current whereabouts, only that YeYe didn't like her. I almost thought I caught an edge beneath his daughter's sweetness, but she was too quick and flawless in her speech to keep me pondering. Number three was apparently young, beautiful, and my aunt. I know that in Chinese culture anybody can be one's aunt--as anybody can be one's sister, brother--and anybody can lovingly heap food into another's bowl at the dinner table, but by all descriptions this illusive "number three" fits the one the family knows that I call Ai Yi, our domestic helper. YeYe is definitely a grandiose character, so the extreme possibilities of any of these lovers, Murder, Missing, and Maid, are all passable in my constellations of him, but if anything, I think it does him best if they are all left, at least partly, Mystery.
My first odd occurrence with YeYe was one that conflicted with American politics. I had finally printed out my American voter's ballot from the State of Washington, which included both state presidential candidates, and was on the computer looking up the small guys--state legislators, secretaries, judges--when YeYe opens my closed door. He walks in and peers first at the computer (can't read it), then at my ballot (can't read it), he then puts on his spectacles to declare moments later that, ah-ha, everything is in English, in English. As I explained that it was my first time to vote, how excited I was to participate, and how important this election was to the American people, he looked at me pitifully. He left the room and came back minutes later with a piece of paper; scrawled across it was the same, beautiful, unintelligible script; which both my lack of vocabulary and his fluid artfulness rendered useless for our communicative purposes. After ten minutes of trying to make some heads or tails with my electronic dictionary and his peering over my shoulder identifying random English words, I told him that I would bring it into my teacher to have her translate it. After I shifted back into political research, he idlded around for a hesitant moment, or two, and left the room only to hastily return for that piece of paper. Within a half-an-hour I had a completely new set of five sentences to present to the teacher. If I would have known then that I would be writing this paper about him now, you'd better believe that I'd have both Chinese translations mentioned here; for if the first was half as interesting as the second, we'd have something really interesting, I think.
Lou Laoshi smiled as she read it, reading it with the same concentration, value, and interest which my Chinese mother assumed, and laughed; "this is a very old viewpoint," she said, "he is telling you to not worry, that you are too pretty of a girl to get mixed up in politics; that politics only spill blood, and that he hopes you choose to not participate in the election."
Upon coming home Ye Ye looked up at me expectantly. Almost in a trepedetiuos manner he waited for my instigation of the letter, and almost in an equally conspicuous way he impulsively asked right before I mentioned it, possibly sensing that I was unsure of how to address the subject. Before asking what I thought about the letter, he asked about what my teacher thought: "did she think it was correct, or not?" I lied and said that she didn't say anything on the matter and only translated, carefully omitting the part about his understandings of the world being considered "old"; something I probably didn't need to do, for in asking about the teacher first, he probably expected it coming. In simple Chinese I said that I thought American political culture history and Chinese political culture history were very different, and that by voting I could possibly end the violence in the middle east. A barrage of weapon hand signs and gargled bomb noises were pelleted at me and we understood that neither of us like weapons.
I think, with Ye Ye, the idea of "peace" has been an important and constant factor throughout his life. He was violently attacked in the name of peace, regardless that it was for something he didn't do, he witnessed peace both inverted and converted to fit purposes that defied everything that peace clearly stood for.
"今年初春，和平又来找我这铁哥们叙旧，一两奔驰停在我新搬的小区楼下，不过下车的可不是那几十年前从农村归来的"小地主"了，简直让我不敢相信，当初那标准的老农，如今满面红光两鬓苍苍，简直像位归国富商。
我深感自愧不如，但和平仍是和平还是那几十年前的性格未变，和平的热情使我意识到眼前这位还是当年的"小地主"，我敬佩的朋友。"
His first lover, apparently--gleaned by words of "si, si, si [death, death, death]" and the much more decisive vocabulary of 'hand sliding horizontally across throat'--died by either murder or sickness during the cultural revolution. His second wife was hastily mentioned. Number two was her mother and currently absent from this large house of people. There was no talk about death or her current whereabouts, only that YeYe didn't like her. I almost thought I caught an edge beneath his daughter's sweetness, but she was too quick and flawless in her speech to keep me pondering. Number three was apparently young, beautiful, and my aunt. I know that in Chinese culture anybody can be one's aunt--as anybody can be one's sister, brother--and anybody can lovingly heap food into another's bowl at the dinner table, but by all descriptions this illusive "number three" fits the one the family knows that I call Ai Yi, our domestic helper. YeYe is definitely a grandiose character, so the extreme possibilities of any of these lovers, Murder, Missing, and Maid, are all passable in my constellations of him, but if anything, I think it does him best if they are all left, at least partly, Mystery.
My first odd occurrence with YeYe was one that conflicted with American politics. I had finally printed out my American voter's ballot from the State of Washington, which included both state presidential candidates, and was on the computer looking up the small guys--state legislators, secretaries, judges--when YeYe opens my closed door. He walks in and peers first at the computer (can't read it), then at my ballot (can't read it), he then puts on his spectacles to declare moments later that, ah-ha, everything is in English, in English. As I explained that it was my first time to vote, how excited I was to participate, and how important this election was to the American people, he looked at me pitifully. He left the room and came back minutes later with a piece of paper; scrawled across it was the same, beautiful, unintelligible script; which both my lack of vocabulary and his fluid artfulness rendered useless for our communicative purposes. After ten minutes of trying to make some heads or tails with my electronic dictionary and his peering over my shoulder identifying random English words, I told him that I would bring it into my teacher to have her translate it. After I shifted back into political research, he idlded around for a hesitant moment, or two, and left the room only to hastily return for that piece of paper. Within a half-an-hour I had a completely new set of five sentences to present to the teacher. If I would have known then that I would be writing this paper about him now, you'd better believe that I'd have both Chinese translations mentioned here; for if the first was half as interesting as the second, we'd have something really interesting, I think.
Lou Laoshi smiled as she read it, reading it with the same concentration, value, and interest which my Chinese mother assumed, and laughed; "this is a very old viewpoint," she said, "he is telling you to not worry, that you are too pretty of a girl to get mixed up in politics; that politics only spill blood, and that he hopes you choose to not participate in the election."
Upon coming home Ye Ye looked up at me expectantly. Almost in a trepedetiuos manner he waited for my instigation of the letter, and almost in an equally conspicuous way he impulsively asked right before I mentioned it, possibly sensing that I was unsure of how to address the subject. Before asking what I thought about the letter, he asked about what my teacher thought: "did she think it was correct, or not?" I lied and said that she didn't say anything on the matter and only translated, carefully omitting the part about his understandings of the world being considered "old"; something I probably didn't need to do, for in asking about the teacher first, he probably expected it coming. In simple Chinese I said that I thought American political culture history and Chinese political culture history were very different, and that by voting I could possibly end the violence in the middle east. A barrage of weapon hand signs and gargled bomb noises were pelleted at me and we understood that neither of us like weapons.
I think, with Ye Ye, the idea of "peace" has been an important and constant factor throughout his life. He was violently attacked in the name of peace, regardless that it was for something he didn't do, he witnessed peace both inverted and converted to fit purposes that defied everything that peace clearly stood for.
"今年初春，和平又来找我这铁哥们叙旧，一两奔驰停在我新搬的小区楼下，不过下车的可不是那几十年前从农村归来的"小地主"了，简直让我不敢相信，当初那标准的老农，如今满面红光两鬓苍苍，简直像位归国富商。
我深感自愧不如，但和平仍是和平还是那几十年前的性格未变，和平的热情使我意识到眼前这位还是当年的"小地主"，我敬佩的朋友。"
Labels: china, intensity, school, story
¶ 11/11/2008 03:36:00 PM 0 Comments
