Instead, my day started at about 10, when I woke up to blue skies and sunshine slipping past the curtains. I walked out onto my balcony and enjoyed my morning bowl of oatmeal mixed with raisins, peanuts, banana chips, and sunflower seeds, accompanied by a boiled egg and a glass of soy bean milk (a delicious, healthy, and cheap way to eat a Western breakfast in China).
Then I was off for my meeting with a Chinese professor to discuss his involvement with schistosomiasis research. Our talk – using my busted Mandarin – went exceeding well, in part I think because I brought him some European chocolates I picked up in Taiwan. I will be heading out to the countryside with him at some point in the near future.
At 4 o’clock I went to lead CUKE, a forum I recently established at Jiangxi Normal University. The name is my attempt at being clever. In English, it’s an acronym for Culture, Understanding, Knowledge, and Exchange.
Chinese people can either understand the name of the forum as a direct translation from English, i.e., 文化碰撞, 互相了解, 知识进发, 真诚交流, or they can see the pinyin for the characters 促 and 可, which when put together literally translates into “able to promote.” I admit, it’s not as clever as the four transliterated syllables for Coca-Cola (可口可乐), which both mimic the sound of the original name and carry the meaning “palatable and pleasurable,” but then again, I didn’t have millions of dollars to invest in hiring a team of geniuses to come up with a name. Anyway, the weekly forum is intended to give any student of the university a chance to ask questions of American culture and Western thinking/attitude, as well as share knowledge on intellectual topics such as philosophy, history, music, or his/her field of study. It’s modeled closely after TED Talks… my inspiration in life. Since I knew seating would be limited, I requested that interested students RSVP to me with topics they would like to discuss or specific questions they had. And boy was I surprised! With only 24 hours notice, and promotion done by hanging a couple dinky flyers around campus, I was barraged with nearly a dozen e-mails from all kinds of students; all with surprisingly awesome English and many with refreshingly evocative questions. One student wrote to me curious about the icons that define America. She wanted me to discuss how I felt about The Statue of Liberty, Barbie, Uncle Sam, American Gothic (the painting), and The Buffalo Nickel. Another student wrote wanting a researched/experienced opinion about “the contradictory on medical plagiarism and intellectual property protection since some developing countries don’t have the ability to apply patent but have to pay the money beyond their manage for those vitally important medicines, like medicine for AIDS which is devastatingly fatal in some developing countries.” Needless to say, the forum went very well (especially for a first meeting), and I think it will develop into something quite nice. At 7pm I went to sit in on my first real Chinese class. With a name like 中国现当代农村社会经济研究 (The Economy of Modern China’s Rural Community), I was a bit anxious to see what I was getting myself into. But things, again, went very well. I understood just about everything that was going on and I learned a little along the way. However, it turns out the content of the class is not going to help my research, so I decided that my first class with Professor Wan would also be my last.
At night I rode home on the back of a motorcycle on seemingly abandoned streets. A block of cold cheese, which I picked up at the recently discovered German import store (apparently the only place in this city of millions that sells real cheese), was waiting for me. If only every day was this good.
把这个博客翻译成中文