We need to start a petition! ZOO TICKET FOR XIE YUFEI
| British Schoolgirl’s Balloon Flies 9,656 Kilometers to China
(Originally found on Shanghaiist.) |
Oh — and co-incidentally, the last character in the guy’s name means is fei, meaning “to fly.”
A student recently e-mailed me an interesting question, and I got kind of carried away answering it. Here’s what she wrote:
Dear Mary,
I am your student of Class at 8:00 on Tuesday.I want to say something with you .
Yesterday, I saw you in the mess hall.When you were near the door ,I saw you went to the table, picked up a clothes on the ground and put it on the chair.At that moment,there were some people eating around , but I wondered why didn¡¯t they do that like you .I have some friends who are studying in the U.S.All of them said that they thought Americans are very nice and helpful,they will help everyone who have some problems. Now I want to know why Americans can be so nice?You have been in China for 7 years,I think that you may know people in China sometimes are selfish.Do you think it is related with religions?
Best wishes!
I answered:
Dear Angel,
That’s an interesting question. I’m not sure how to answer it. Of course, not all Americans are willing to help other people, and not all Americans are raised in the same way. But in general, I think:
a.) When you’re little, your parents often try to get you to behave by asking you how you think your behavior would make other people feel. For instance, if you wanted to take another child’s toy, your mother might say to you, “How would Jimmy feel if you took his toy away? How would you feel if someone took your toy away?” Or, if you say something mean to someone, she’d ask you, “How would you feel if someone spoke to you that way?” I think that affects us as adults. I remember I thought I would feel really upset if I’d dropped my sweater and it was either lost permanently or ruined. I thought about how the sweater might have been expensive for the person who bought it, and how disappointed the person would be that it was lost. So, I picked it up and put it on the chair so it would be easier to find.
b.) It might have something to do with religion. For example, in Christianity, people are often told if they do good things, God will reward them when they die. Even if they don’t receive any reward for what they do now, they will in the next life. I think that often influences people to at least try to do good things. It’s interesting to me that in Judaism (which several million Americans believe in), there is a big emphasis on doing good deeds, but they don’t believe you will be rewarded for it in the future. You should just do good deeds on principle, or to make the world a better place. That impresses me because the people are just doing good deeds without any expectation of a reward.
c.) A lot of Americans believe “what goes around comes around.” Or people even say they believe in karma. This is a concept in Hinduism and Buddhism that says that if you do good things now, you will be rewarded in the future, and if you do bad things now, bad things will happen to you in the future. In Hinduism, this has something to do with being rewarded after you die, but Americans think of it being rewarded (or punished) in this life. For example, an American might believe that if you didn’t warn someone they were leaving their wallet behind, later on they would lose their own wallet. (Even though Hinduism and Buddhism aren’t so common in America, they were really popular amongst youths in the 60’s and 70’s, so some of their ideas have entered our mainstream culture.)
d.) Oh — here’s another reason related to religion. In the kind of Christianity called Catholicism, there are two kinds of sins: Sins of commission, and sins of omisssion. Sins of commission are bad things you do, like stealing something. But, you can also sin by NOT doing something you SHOULD do. That’s a sin of omission. Let’s say I had the chance to help someone by retrieving their lost sweater, and I didn’t do it. I’d be committing a sin of omission. This kind of belief is good in that it pushes you to help people more often, but bad in that it leads you to feel guilty often!
There’s also the interesting question: When Chinese people don’t help others, why is it they don’t help? I’d say that often in the West, girls are taught to put others before themselves. It’s not ladylike to be demanding, to want to be first in line, etc. However, China has a lot more people, and if you didn’t think of putting yourself first, maybe you couldn’t get what you need. If you let people get on the bus before you, for example, maybe there wouldn’t be any room for you to get on. Also, in the past, when China was poorer, there wasn’t always enough food or resources to go around, so people who put others first could end up with nothing. So, people, both boys and girls, have been taught to take care of themselves first. I think it’s related to the population problem and to poverty in the past.
Of course, I’ve had a lot of really good experiences with Chinese people helping me, like when I got lost in Guangzhou railway station and a gong an took me to my train herself. I’ve also seen other people be very kind. When I was in Shenzhen, there was a poor family that ran a little restaurant. Some Japanese students used to go there, and when they noticed they hadn’t seen one girl for a long time and found out it was because she’d been feeling ill, they went to the foreign students’ dormitory and took her to the hospital themselves! They even paid the registration fee for her! This is despite the fact that may Chinese people still don’t like Japanese.
What do you think of my answers? Thank you for sending me such an interesting question!
Have a good holiday,
MFC
Classes started a couple weeks ago, and I got a big surprise on the first day. I walked into class and said, “Welcome to Oral English for Ph.D. students!” The students looked at me, shocked, and said, “We’re not Ph.D. students!” It turns out they are all in their first year of M.A. study. Nobody thought to tell ME, however. I believe I was told my students would be the same as the last time I taught the class. I was upset and embarrassed, and complained to the grad school’s contact person. She replied in an e-mail that she had told me they were postgraduates. I informed her that both M.A. and Ph.D. students were postgrads, and this situation had caused me a lot of embarrassment, not to mention trouble. I could have been preparing new lessons, asking the other people who teach the M.A.’s what they do in class, making sure all of our workloads and testing procedures around about the same, etc. But instead I thought everything was hunky-dory, and went to Qingdao. So, since then, I’ve been talking to Ed, another one of the teachers here, to see what he does with his classes, and tomorrow I’m going to have dinner with a student who had Doug Cooper’s class a while ago.
In other local problems, Dog Man’s father has stopped eating. I hadn’t seen him for like a month, and was thinking of asking if he was okay. Then the other day I saw him, and he was really skeletal. I asked about it, and Dog Man told me that he’s barely eaten anything for a month. They’ve asked him what’s wrong, offered to buy him any food he wants, tried to cook things he’d like, but it doesn’t work. They wanted him to go to the hospital, but he wasn’t willing. Dog Man got really upset talking about it, and almost cried. He and his big sister are really worried, although his oldest brother doesn’t seem bothered by the situation at all. I saw his dad the day before yesterday, and talked to him a bit, asking him if his stomach hurt or anything like that. He said no, but that he didn’t have any appetite. I do wonder if he is depressed, since he does not really do anything all day (even though his kids have tried to encourage him to play mah-jiang and spend time in the elderly people’s clubhouse in the back of the housing development). Then again, he has had a few strokes, and maybe that has impaired his ability to feel hungry. Yesterday they finally arranged for him to get an IV for some nourishment. The whole situation is really tough for Dog Man and his sister, who have been taking care of their dad for the past eight years since their mother died.
I meant to post this before, but a month or so ago Matt M. went to North Korea to see the Mass Games. He found it a strange land of many power outages, unfortunately sometimes when he was in close proximity to unrestrained circus bears.
You can see some pictures here:
It seems like it.
I’ve been planning to apply for grad school in TESOL for next year, and I went to find out when I could take the GRE. I’ve missed the signup deadline by about a week! That means if I can’t retrieve my old scores, from the test I took ten or eleven years ago, I’m screwed! That’s so awful! I just feel it in my bones that I’ve got to do something else next year!
An interesting article about it from AlterNet:
77cm crack found in China Airlines plane
The confusing bit is that there is a China Airlines and an Air China. One is from the Mainland, and the other is from Taiwan. So is this from the same company whose plan burst into flames upon landing? I can’t remember.
From USA Today:
Rice, al-Maliki steer clear of shoutout issue, each other
I wondered who they’d be giving shoutouts to (Republicans, Iraqis?) when I looked into the article and saw that it was really shootouts that were the problem. Probably the headline was a Freudian slip by a nervous white employee. I wonder if he/she will get in trouble for this?
It rained like mad all day today, and I didn’t know why until I had dinner with my co-worker Teya, whose son I was watching this afternoon. We’re in the midst of a TYPHOON! I had no idea one was coming, despite having watched CCTV-9 news and listening to CRI Radio news pretty faithfully. CCTV-9 news is always boring crap about some government official visiting some country you’ve never heard of, or some international pork pricing conference, but it never tells you anything useful, like that a typhoon is heading to your town (or maybe it is so boring that by the time they mention that, you’ve changed to another channel). Looking at Shanghaiist tonight, I found that 200,000 people in the city have actually been evacuated. We don’t even get the day off work, though.
No, it was just television.
Whild visiting Qingdao I stumbled across the filming of a TV drama called “Who Understands My Heart?” In this scene, the main character’s boyfriend is beaten up by a group of thugs. The actress in this picture is well-known, having played a nurse on a popular show. I don’t know who she is, though. The male actor looked familiar, but maybe just because he had that Korean hearthrob look that is so big these days.
Cuban guy to Russian girl: All Russian girls I’ve ever met love anal sex. No, seriously, they are all into that shit — and pomegranate.
–1st Ave
Overheard by: Asmar
(From www.overheardinnewyork.com)
He looks like he’s trying to talk on a cell phone. From a safety/disaster preparedness handbook I got in my mailbox a while back.
An interesting quote from a Daily Mainichi article:
Kitamura says he has been researching Japanese sexuality for more than 30 years and is disappointed that women don’t take enough advantage of their chances to masturbate.
From “Ladies loose-lipped on sex, but masturbation gets diddly-squat,” by Ryann Connell.
Abe to resign as prime minister
You heard it here first!
An excerpt from the sign in front of a cave I visited in Qingdao.
He’s the main character of a new story I’ve written. Pam K. and I drew him one night while listening to jazz at the Cotton Club. If you’re interested in reading the first installment in the story of Half-Horse Boy, just drop me a line and I’ll send it to you.
At home, the picture of the guy with the van looks a little thin, and the whole page displays correctly. When I look it here at a net bar,the picture isnormal, but the whole page is screwed up, with the Flickr pictures and login at the bottom.
How does the page display for you? Just let me know and I can redo it if other people are having problems.
Qingdao people don’t seem to drink liquids with meals.
They eat tons of mantou (steamed bread).
There are lots of big spiders (but not scarily big) that look a lot like American garden spiders, but have thinner bodies.
The population is so low compared to Shanghai that it looks to me like the streets are practically empty all the time.
People drive in a civilized way, and rarely run red lights.
Sometimes they do drive on the sidewalk, though.
People are very helpful, although they run their words together so it is not easy forme to understand them.
Oh — I got to watch part of a TV show being filmed! It was a TV drama called WHO UNDERSTANDS MY HEART? I understand the main actress in it is pretty famous, and played a nurse on another show, but I don’t recognize her. I’ll post pictures later.
This morning I went swimming, because a) I like swimming and b) I’d be a dope if I went to Qingdao and didn’t swim. On the beach I met and started chatting with this guy who works for the ministry of agriculture. He was nice, but he wanted to hang out with me for the rest of the day. I didn’t know about that, but it was hard to say no without being rude. We did hang around for a while together and visited the Catholic Church and this art nouveau-style German villa. The problem was, he kept wanting to take my photo and hold my hand! I’d just met him,and I didn’t like that. He asked me to have dinner with him, and also wanted to drive me to the airport tomorrow. I did consent to dinner, although I tried to find away to get out of the airport thing. The whole wanting to hold my hand just made me nervous. In the end, I started feeling jittery about the dinner thing too, and asked one of the workers at my hotel if he thought it would be a good idea to go. He said he wouldn’t do it if he were me, since I’m a woman, alone, and I don’t know Qingdao too well. I thought that was good advice, and coming from a guy gave it extra credence. So, I came down and apologized to the man, and told him I couldn’t go with him. It was embarrassing (probably for him, too), but I said that I wasn’t used to doing stuff like that with people I didn’t know well,since we don’t do that in America. I thought that was the most diplomatic way to explain it. I’m sorry if I hurt his pride or anything, but I don’t want to get into any upsetting or scary situations.
