Normality Returns, More or Less

Slowly but surely, the holidays are fading away. Last week at school, we had special winter courses--six hours a day with five kids, aged ten to fourteen,* 不好玩儿 (not good fun)--but starting tomorrow, normal work schedules resume at school, and I anticipate my regular tutor will be returning to Shenzhen before too long. Nersey and Jia are still in the US but are apparently due to return on Friday, so my dinners and trips to the park to ti jianzi with Panda will likely become less frequent. (Since my Chinese isn't good enough yet to have truly interesting conversations, this last will be a bit of a break.)

More importantly, the weather is slowly returning to normal. Though we had a bit of drizzle on Friday and Saturday, the temperature has been warmer for a few days now. I've been going to bed without a jacket and two pairs of socks, and I haven't seen my breath in the shower for three straight mornings. Yesterday afternoon was downright pleasant--sunny and warm enough for me to actually sweat a bit going to the 银行 (yin hang--bank) and 咖啡厅 (kafeiting--coffee shop). Dawei and I played chess for an hour or so yesterday afternoon (I lost miserably), and as we were parting ways, a bit of spotty rain started, without turning the weather into a miserable chill. So there may be a few weeks ahead of fine weather before the usual sauna-style humidity and heat kick in.

As seems to be my luck this year, I've caught yet another cold. I managed to stave off any sickness through all the truly cold and miserable days, only to wake up with a stuffy nose and watery eyes on Friday. Fortunately, it's a bit better today, so if this warm spell continues a while, perhaps I'll recover quickly.

*The class consisted of a ten-year-old girl, a boy and girl (both twelve years old) and two fourteen-year old boys. As is usual in China, the ten-year-old girl had the strongest English and did most of the communicating in the class, while the older girl was shy and quiet and the three boys spent most of their time hitting each other, telling stupid jokes in Chinese and asking the ten-year-old girl, "他说什么? 什么意思 ?" The boys, who together managed to show the intelligence of a box of rocks, seemed to feel no shame over being outshined by a little girl half their height and a third their weight. In another thirty years, I predict China will be run by women.

再感冒: Yet Another Cold
Originally posted--03:42, 2007-12-07

Well, it seems I'm doomed to catch colds this year. Last year, it was laduzi (literally, "pouring stomach") that I had problems with, so there isn't too much room to complain about it: a runny nose beats running to the toilet every ten or twenty minutes, even if the cost on toilet paper is about the same. A bit tired of the sniffling, though, I decided to do something about the cold this time and broke out one of my Zicam sprayers. Whoever came up with Zicam deserves some sort of reward; one day of squirting what feels like more mucus into my nose, and I've more or less recovered. (Granted, drinking four bottles of grapefruit juice and sleeping seven hours in the middle of the day yesterday may have helped.)

Being under the weather also gave me a full day to do nothing but practice my hanzi. Right now I'm picking words up at a pace of about ten per day and occasionally getting in anywhere from twenty to thirty on my days off. So far they're not doing a great deal of good, except that I can read more words in signs I can't make any sense of, but some things are starting to click into place. The first book of conversations Jia got me is more or less casual reading, and today while filling out student reports for classes, I realized I could read most of the Chinese--mostly limited to phrases like xia ge yue women hui xue _____ ("Next month we will study _____.") And I took a glance at the textbook I was using last year, only to realize that with a few exceptions like sushe, tushuguan and yundongchang (dormitory, library, and playing field), I know how to write most of the characters for the first fifteen chapters. I can also follow most of the readings, though I don't think I could actually figure out the sentence patterns enough to actually say anything like what I'm reading. I guess I'll have to be in the market for a sentence pattern book and CD before all the words I'm learning leak away from disuse.

Chinese Wisdom on Ganmao
Originally posted--08:35, 2007-10-29
If you have the misfortune to ganmao (catch a cold), rest assured that you will not want for lack of reasons why. Over the past few days, I've heard my cold attributed to everything from the weather to what, stateside, we might call a failure of moral character. Not one of the Chinese explanations has involved viri or bacteria, and nearly all have pointed to a personal failure on my part in some way.

Like in the US, the most common explanation for my cold has been a change in the weather; the temperature is dropping in Shenzhen, and I've failed to dress appropriately. Granted, the weather has indeed been getting cooler: we've had Chinese-brisk temperatures in the low 80s during the day, and at night, the temperature has even dropped to a Chinese-freezing 78 F. I dress year-round in slacks or jeans and a button-down shirt (with an undershirt) and have had a hard time explaining to any Chinese that--as my sweating clearly indicates--the only way I could be dressed inappropriately for 83 degree weather would be to go outside clad in nothing but a few strategically placed ice packs and maybe a dry-ice hat. I've also had that evil of all evils--the air-conditioner--blamed for my condition, and explanations that air conditioning at worst creates dry air (in dry climates, not in 65% humidity), which causes dry sinuses and often cold-like symptoms, fall on deaf ears. Granted, this explanation is just as common in the States, but at least in English the confusion is highly lexical: "He caught a cold." In Chinese, "ganmao" (feel rashly) doesn't seem to make the confusion with mild hypothermia as natural, though it may explain why the explanations for illness seem so accusatory. "Sick" in Chinese is "binghuan," the first part of which does sound like "cold" (though it simply means ill and its components mean "spread" and "fire"), so perhaps some confusion originates here.

Here, most illnesses are easily blamed on drinking cold water, and a cold is no exception. This explanation makes sense given the quality of water in China. Tap water here must be boiled before drinking (a process that brings out all the less pleasant tastes in what should be an almost tasteless liquid), and drinking cold water from the tap would certainly explain laduzi and related illnesses if nothing else. Based on the smell of the tap water, I wouldn't be surprised if it also caused dysentery, cancer, and spontaneous death. Naturally enough, I drink bottled water, as anyone here with the financial wherewithal to do so chooses to.

I've also had it explained that my cold may not be a "cold" cold, but a "hot" cold, a result of to much inner heat. This could be due to my diet, my temper, or my inherently (foreign and therefore) lustful nature. I have no idea how to respond to such explanations, other than to state that my diet is relatively well-balanced (if short on fajitas following the closing of Andes), that if brief bursts of sullen anger caused colds I'd long since have died of respiratory problems in China, and that I've had the libido of a pile of dirty laundry most of the time I've been in China.

Whatever the explanations, they've invariably been followed by the suggestion that I should take medicine (i.e., antibiotics) or try some Chinese medicine (i.e., weird concoctions of vegetables and dried parts of, usually, endangered animals or intimidating physical treatments). Trying to explain that anti-biotics are actually useless against a virus is wasted energy in a country where people often take eight or nine different medications to treat a case of the heebie-jeebies. Those suggesting Chinese medicine are often pacified when I tell them that I'm eating garlic (as long as I don't mention that this is a common practice in Western culture as well). Some of the more adamant insist that I still must take some official medicine, usually pointing out that I'm obviously uncomfortable. I try insisting that most symptoms of a cold are natural and healthy: coughing helps loosen and rid the body of sputum; sneezing helps loosen and rid the body of excess mucus; having to blow your nose is a good thing, since it's flushing the system of germs and dead white-blood cells. Little use. They still insist that I shouldn't be bushufu (uncomfortable), a word which is synonymous with sick in Chinese. (You'd think that a culture that says, "uncomfortable," to mean sick would accept the idea of discomfort being acceptable for someone ill, but apparently not.)

I've also had recommendations for acupuncture, massages, and a few other practices I don't entirely understand. Perhaps the most kindly offer came from Jia (whose mother is a Chinese doctor); she assured me that her mother would be more than happy to give me a hot-glass treatment to cure my cold, since her mother considers me good people. The sentiment is touching, but since the treatment involves using glass globes and heat to create a series of self-contained vacuums all over the back (a process which leaves people covered in circular bruises), the cure seems worse than the cold just now.

The universal bit of advice I've gotten has been to dress warmly and get plenty of rest. The latter seems sound advice, so I'm now off to bed.