Today I’m starting a little trip to ShaoXing and NingBo. I’m hoping to have a good time getting out of Shanghai. I’m going alone, which always scares me a little, but I couldn’t find anyone else to come, and didn’t just want to stay in Shanghai again.
Today I translated “how much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood” into Chinese. I have a strange sense of achievement, because I have a feeling nobody else has ever translated this before, probably because the sentence is basically useless. I can’t write it in characters on this machine, but basically it’s pronounced, “Ru guo tu ba shu hui reng mu de hua, tu ba shu reng duo shao mu?” Impress your friends!
I finally filmed a little segment for ROX! I’ve been meaning to do it for a long time, but finally it’s finished! I was talking to the students in my Monday class (which includes some Film Aesthetics students) about my desire to shoot a little piece about snake wine, and suddenly my student TL (who turned out to own the Bentley) spoke up and said his company had some snake wine, and plenty of video equipment, and he wanted to help me do it.
He picked me up Sunday morning, and we cruised into Pudong in his very impressive car. I learned that a Bentley has a lot of leg room, the doors shut quietly, and in this model, anyway, the whole inside is done up in leather. The ignition turns on with a push of a (cool-looking) button.
TL showed me around his company, which in involved in several different operations, including making steel, making special steel that is used in bridges, and the insurance building. According to what his assistant told me later, the company profits 10 billion RMB yearly. That’s over one billion dollars. My student is the principal shareholder. TL has collected a lot of famous painting and calligraphy by famous artists. He showed me these and explained them all to me. He’s also commissioned several seals from a famous seal-carver and owns all sorts of antiques, including an inkstone that belonged to one of the last emperors of China. I touched it! He also has a secret room in his office — it looks like it’s just a closet, but you open a secret panel in the back, and it takes you into another room! If he didn’t show it to you, you’d have no way to know it was there.
After we chatted for a while, his assistants brought out the snake wine and the video cameras. He had two different kinds of snake wine — five-poisonous-snake wine and deer wine. The poisonous snake wine had a cobra, beaded (?) krait, and others in the bottle. It also had two large gekkos floating in there. I asked how they could make wine from poisonous snakes, and they said the poison was only in the fangs and in glands in the body, which were removed before the snakes were put in the solution. The deer wine inlcuded sliced deer testicles and antlers, plus this weird curly thing that is a worm during part of the year, and after exposure to a fungus, becomes a plant for the rest of the year. I don’t know how this is possible, but that’s what they told me. They said it’s found in Qinghai Lake.
I think the whole interview bit was a little static and stilted. The two guys got really nervous, and my student in particular was reluctant to speak English. Still, I’m hoping with a little judicious editing it will be cool and interesting.
Afterward, we went to look at more wines, but at this point, the camera had run out of power. We looked at snake gall bladder wine, and deer ovary wine. Then we went out to lunch, where we had a great meal, including snake meat (which takes kind of like a cross between chicken and frog, and is really a job to eat because of the bones) and probably the biggest lobster I’d ever seen. I really would recommend the restaurant, Xiao Nan Guo. We drank wine, a 1992 Great Wall Cabernet Sauvin.. whatever. I can’t spell it. Then we went out for mango ice for dessert.
This royal treatment, and all the expense my student must have gone to, made me feel a little strange, although he’s a rich guy. I had fun, and I hope he did too. I think he really liked showing me his office, his art, and all that. It was a really good day, a really interesting experience.
One of my old students came over yesterday and reinstalled my system. All my documents and pictures are intact, so I’m happy. I’ve finally learned my lesson about that and backed everything up on an external drive. The only thing is I still can’t get online (I think I just don’t understand how to start everything up, because the softwear is in Chinese), so I’m missing submitting things to Flickr.
I’m embarrassed to admit I may have administered the coup de grace to my computer last night. I found this thing on it called wifeman, which I thought was a virus, and I decided to search for every file with that in it and put it in the recycle bin. The problem is I removed stuff that is important, I think, because today almost everything disappeared from my desktop, and I couldn’t open what’s there. A student’s friend will hopefully come over tonight to try to fix it.
Every once in a while, I see a silver Bentley parked outside of my classroom building. I’ve always wondered who could on our campus could possibly own such an expensive car. I couldn’t really think of anybody except the 100 meter hurdles guy, and I thought even that was unlikely. Every time the car appeared, it’d end up surrounded by guys who take pictures of it with camera phones. Well! It turns out it belongs to one of the students in my class! I didn’t believe him, then he opened the door, pulled out his wallet, and showed me his business car. He’d always talked about the company he worked for — it turns out it’s HIS company! He said his car is one of only six Bentleys in Mainland China.
Oh yeah, there were all these anonymously planted CD-ROMs planted in classrooms on Wednesday morning, with notes on them asking people to watch them. I assume they had something to do with the demonstrations (or were something anti-Japanese, anyway). I kind of wish I had picked one up and checked out what it was. If I can still find a copy laying around, I’ll look at it.
I just read a report on Yahoo that there was a huge anti-Japanese riot in Shanghai today, involving 20,000 people, and resulting in considerable property damage. I just e-mailed someone to ask them about it, and they said there was no riot because it was prevented by the police. I was actually going to go downtown today, but didn’t, so I wasn’t in the area. Instead I wandered around an poor little area near my university, chatted with the locals, watched someone shoot part of a wedding video, then went to a wet market where I watched a lady debone eels. Maybe I’ll go downtown tomorrow to see if I can see any evidence of what happened. I’m also wondering if anyone took photos and put them on Flickr. That’d be a good way to get around news censorship.
I tried to say something about this yesterday, but lost the post. All of a sudden, I lost most of my fonts, and now a lot of the things that should be arrows or icons have turned into numbers of a thing that looks like a little man in a room. I MUST have a virus on here, but I can’t find it anywhere. Do these problems sound familiar?
I had a strange conversation today with a man with two thumbs. Actually, the conversation was relatively normal (he was trying to convince me he was one of my students even though I don’t think he’s ever come to my class before), the strange thing was his right thumb(s). It looked sort of like a two-headed snake — from the top knuckle onward it split into two different thumbs, both with its own nail. I kept trying to put it out of my mind while I looked at him, but I found myself sort of making fists, and grabbing my own thumbs the whole time.
Lately I’ve been noticing some coincidences – I hear something funny, and then hear it again, unexpectedly. There’ve been three – but just at this moment I can only remember two. First, I was watching The Hebrew Hammer, which had a minor character called Sammy Davis Junior, Junior, and then I started reading Everything Is Illuminated, by Johnathan Safran Foer, which had a minor character named Sammy Davis Junior, Junior. I recently watched They Live, and then I saw the South Park episode “Cripplefight,” where the fight between Timmy and Jimmy was edited to the fight from They Live. I think the third was either related to Judaism or film. I was just thinking about it, so I’m surprised I can remember what it was.
My geography majors invited me to go to a park with them Friday. We all met at the Mao Zedong statue, got in the hired van, and went. It took an hour or so to get there, and there was a big sign outside the park telling us what we could and couldn’t do. We were forbidden to participate in feudal, reactionary or superstitious activities, which was okay because mostly we just wanted to have a barbecue. After that, we played badminton, flew kites (although that was also forbidden) and took tons of pictures. I’m actually not keen on having my picture taken, but lots of people wanted pictures with me, so of course I did it. There was a little amusement park within the park, with rides including a flume and a roller coaster. The coaster was really tiny, so I went on it, but found it was really scary and fast anyway. All the jouncing around hurt my neck, which means I probably shouldn’t go on one again anytime soon.
I went back to the hospital to get the results of the MRI today, and happily, there’s nothing serious wrong. According to the doctor, the scan revealed a nearly 1 cm diameter cyst under my nipple, which is causing all the trouble. They didn’t find any irregularities in the milk ducts. The course of therapy is to eliminate caffeine from my diet, and come back in about three months for a checkup. Whew!
Later I went to the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center, where I saw part of the play Story of Emperor Li Ya Zi. I left during the intermission, though, because it was so boring. I felt a bit guilty, but it was really unbearable. The central relationship of the play was the one between the emperor and his father’s concubine, who had a forbidden love, but I couldn’t detect any chemistry between them at all. I just didn’t believe the whole scenario. The concubine even seemed sort of sinister to me, which I don’t think she was supposed to be. Maybe I missed something major, some sort of twist or revelation, by leaving so early. Nonetheless, because the whole play was falling flat for me, I decided to leave. This is the second play where I’ve done that. I also left The Power of the Dog (or something like that) during the intermission when I saw it in Washington.
I had the MRI today. I was guided through the procedure by the initially appealing but soon annoying William. I had to take off my shirt, get up on the machine and lay on some plastic molds, and then be moved slowly into the main tube of the machine. Then I had to lay there for like 15 minutes and listen to a series of beeps and farting noises while the machine worked. Then William injected some (pleantly cool, actually) dye into my arm, and I waited another ten minutes or so, listening to more beeping and farting while lying as still as possible.
It really wasn’t as scary or claustaphobic as I’d thought it would be. The inside of the machine was all white, and I felt like I was in 2001. There was even a little camera “face” at the mouth of the tube, with a little “eye” and everything, which made me think of HAL.
I was supposed to have my first little publication credit, in an article my student wrote about pre-prepared giant panda feeds, but my name was left out of the acknowledgements portion, maybe because they typesetter was too lazy to whip out the English type again. Ah well. What a bummer. My student was really apologetic about it. Looking over the article, I found the abstract, which was the main part I helped her with, reads really well, but there’s a misprint in the TITLE! Oh well. I guess most of the people reading it won’t understand much English anyway, so it won’t matter. If it gets accepted to a foreign journal, it can be changed then.
(To explain, I helped write the article’s English abstract, plus the English that appeared in tables and notes.)
I did go to the doctor yesterday. He suggested that I may have a benign tumor in one of my milk ducts, and if this is true, I ought to have surgery to remove it. To find out for sure, I’m going in for an MRI today. I don’t really know what to expect — in my imagination, they’ll put me in some sort of long tube and do some photoimaging. I ought to look it up online to see what it’ll be like. Anyway, it’s expensive — 700 RMB (about $80, I guess). I was pretty relieved at the doctor’s idea, since I was worried about cancer, but then I realized if I get an operation there will be pain to deal with then too. Really, the thing I’m most scared of with the operation is the anaesthesia! According to the doctor, the operation won’t be disfiguring (that’s what he said, anyway). Theoretically, my school will pay me back for the test, and for the surgery, but I’m afraid they’ll can me because they won’t want to pay. Actually, the GOOD news I got yesterday was that they wanted me to come back, and I was thinking that now that I know this I can relax, and decide to devote next year to personal/professional development, but now this … I haven’t told my parents about any of this, and I don’t know if I will. They can’t do anything about the situation, and having them worry about it wouldn’t do anybody any good.
I’m having more bodily troubles. As embarrassing as it is to say, I’m having trouble crapping. Actually, I am going a bit each day, but the amount is really small compared to what’s going into my body. I’ve started taking some medicine, fiber supplements, and hot water with honey, but there doesn’t seem to be much effect. What I just pooped out a few minutes ago was full of sesame seeds, and I haven’t eaten those for like five days, so I must have a lot more poop in there waiting to come out.
I’ve got the bloody breast discharge problem again. That’s scary — I’d hoped it was just caused by some sort of accidental injury or incidental infection, but now it seems like it may be caused by some sort of serious problem. I’m going to the doctor again Mnday to have it checked out. I may drop in to the little community health center Tuesday just to see what they say/do, and if it’s different than what I heard at the big hospital. I’ve been wondering what to do if the problem turns out the be a symptom of something REALLY serious (and it’s probably clear what I’m talking about here). I think I’d at least try to stay in China to get treatment, because I couldn’t afford it in the US.
Yesterday I got tickets for a Chinese opera, The Legend of Li Yazi. I’d actually also wanted to get one to see Nouvelle Vague, a French jazz band that plays covers of 80’s new wave somgs (Killing Joke covers, etc.), but the only ones left were VERY expensive. I have a hard time believing anybody would pay 580 RMB to see this kind of show (like $65!).