August 23 — We have been back from our trip for a full day now. It is 10:30 p.m. and the racket is incredible. They started pounding and hammering outside our apartment at about 8 a.m. During our holiday the roads to all the old apartments were broken up, by sledge hammer of course, and are now in the process of being repaved. Today it is our apartment’s turn. This morning they laid the steel edgework in place and around 2 p.m. began to pour the cement, bringing in motorized handcarts one after the other. As each is dumped, levered up by a hand-turned hoist, the workers level the piles of cement with their shovels. They level the area with a box made from 2 steel beams about 18 inches apart, with a motor sitting on top, which vibrates and settles the cement. They move the box by pulling on it with ropes. Two workers with trowels trail behind to smooth out the rough spots.
Ahh, now it is finally quiet here as the motor has stopped. Actually, they are in a bit of a fix because they still have another 30 feet of wet concrete to finish, but the motor on their box has quit. I don't know what they will do if they can't restart it, because the rough concrete will have set up by morning.
An hour ago someone knocked on our door wanting to drill through our wall to install a security intercom. I informed him that we were going to sleep and that he should come back tomorrow, but he pleaded that he needed to finish one more apartment before he quit for the night. Finally I let him into Usman's old apartment upstairs. They drilled and pounded and went away happy. I guess that we will be getting a security gate at the bottom opening on Sunday; the other foreign teachers felt they needed it.
After Jeffery left yesterday, I cleaned the entire kitchen. It wasn't as bad as when Earnest stayed here, but then Earnest had 6 weeks of cooking to Jeffery’s two. Give Jeffery another 2 weeks and he would threaten Earnest’s record. Jeffery came by late this afternoon to study English and cool off. He had the AC in the living room set at 17 degrees [about 63 F] while we were away, so it will be interesting to see what the electricity bill is this month.
We went swimming this afternoon, or rather wading as the water was waist deep on me. The children have had a lot of fun with the toys from the box that you sent. It was waiting for us when we arrived home. Tariqa promptly put the little ball-shooter things together and lost both balls on the first firing. Taalan rescued them this afternoon from behind the furniture. Taalan took the new Frisbee outside to play with a friend. Whenever it was too high to catch, they kept hitting it with a stick, and his friend knocked a big chunk off the edge. So much for the Frisbee... We took the tossing rings to the pool and Taalan conned an unknown number of college students into throwing them to him and his friends to catch in the water.
It has rained so much in China recently, though it’s not the rainy season. It has rained everywhere for at least the last ten days. The Xiang River is within 10 feet of the top of the levee. Without it, Xiangtan would be under water. Coming home on the train, in many places the water was over the banks, flooding fields and some of the homes.
They just got the engine going, so we’ll have smooth pavement after all. The whole building seems to be vibrating from the noise, and they are getting closer. Oh well, it is still nice to be back. There is nothing like home sweet home, where ever it may be.
August 25 — I spent an hour or two with Emily and Scott. Taalan began to teach Scott Chinese chess and we chatted. Scott made a very interesting observation: he had never seen a country or people so dead as in China. Everything they do is empty ritual, nothing more. He also said that the government wanted the people to develop faster than they were ready for or capable of. He likened it to giving a stone-age man a loaded pistol, hence the lack of traffic safety, etc. He has noticed that individually the people are usually kind, but in groups their treatment of each other is depressingly harsh. I have to agree. It has been difficult lately to remain upbeat and positive. If I can keep my sense of humor then I have a chance.
Here is a quick anticdote (this may be one of my words). [Anne has a way of unintentionally scrambling two words together into something humorous.] Today I was shopping with Tariqa and had picked up a dress for her. We were talking about whether she liked it when a young lady (about 25) came up to us with a similar dress in her hands. She reached over and held it up to the back of my dress so compare the size. On discovering that her dress was about two inches longer, she grabbed my dress and started to walk off, even though I was still holding on to it. I was floored. I said something like, “No, No. What are you doing?” She just looked at me, said “Oh,” let go of the dress, and walked off. I also had a funny experience at the pool this afternoon. A man came up to us at the pool. I was nearest to him and it was to me that he addressed the comment, "Welcome to China." I laughed and said that since I had been here 3 years already he was a little late, but thank you all the same.
I don't think Changsha has floated away yet, but I haven't watched the news tonight. Peter emailed us. He had called his family last night and they are all fine. The water is about a meter below the peak level in 1998, when they had to patrol the levee. [Peter’s family lives at the edge of Dongting Lake. In 1998 major floods caused disasters in many places, but their levee had held.]
September 3 — The children started classes yesterday. Taalan has 32 hours a week and Tariqa almost that much. This semester alone, she will learn 370 new Chinese characters. [She is beginning second grade.] Taalan is already challenged in math. They are learning algebraic equations and, from the looks of his textbook, will be doing cubes, square roots, sines, cosines, and more. [He is beginning seventh grade.]
We are learning to cope with the new security door. I hate the intercom because it rings for as long as little fingers press the button, and it is very loud. We also have new lights outside our windows, but they are OK because they’re not very bright. We also have new concrete in front of everything. For several weeks it was covered with rice-straw mats, but in the last two days they pulled them all up and burned them in the little building behind our apartment. We have had to keep all the windows shut because of the smoke coming in. Wow, did the house stink! Incense did nothing to mask it. When I brought in my wash tonight, all the clothes smelled of smoke, so I have to wash them all again. Luckily it was only some towels and swim suits.
The children are getting very tired of Chinese food, and I can't blame them. I made a carrot cake for lunch this afternoon, and I guess that started them thinking of western cuisine. We decided to go out for dinner instead of eating the same old same old veggies this evening.
Tariqa is finishing up her bath and Taalan is still at his friend's restaurant. The turtles are fine, as are the two fish. We decided that we would get a few more fish and feed them to the turtles if they died. The fish have decided not to die, so we have two fish. The turtles are really interesting, though it seems a sacrilege to buy small chunks of pork or fish to feed them. They will take the pieces of meat out of our hands. We know when they are getting hungry because the Terminator will come up from the deep end and stare at you or bite at your fingers if you put them in the water. They climb all over the couch and cushions when we let them out. They are surprisingly fast.
September 9 — Strangely Wrapped Gifts — That’s the name of a song by Red Grammar. The gist of the song is that the challenges we face are special gifts from God to help us open the door of our strength and understanding a little wider.
The past week has been quite a mix of these strangely wrapped gifts. The students were arriving back, so I have been catching up with some of them about their summers. As you know Jeffery's family is having their challenges. [One relative has lost his business and home due to gambling debts, and it’s not over yet.] Apparently so is Earnest's family. His brother is having difficulty with his marriage. He had bought a tofu shop, but his wife does not want to work in a tofu shop. Just before Earnest left to come back here, she packed her clothes and went home to her mother. She left the little twins for Earnest’s mother to take care of. Earnest's mom is busy helping his brother by selling the tofu, so the twins were taken out to the farm, which Earnest’s dad is trying to run single-handed. Somehow, he also must take care of two two-year-olds. Earnest said that he called the wife’s mother's home and the mother said that the wife would not care for the children well and that they needed to stay where they were. It’s hard to believe.
Poor Earnest… He says that though he doesn't like school exams, he welcomes them now compared to having to deal with these problems. The wife worked in Guangdong [a big city in the south] last year and wants to go back. She doesn’t want to live in a small town, look after kids, sell tofu, or do farm work any more. Earnest and I spent several hours talking. I said that it might help if the wife were more a part of the decision-making process and had her own responsibilities in the business, but the bottom line is that she had made a commitment to Earnest's brother and to the children she birthed. If the family takes on all the care of the children and allows her to do what she wants, she will never return. If she’s faced with caring for the twins even if she’s on her own, she will have second thoughts about leaving. There’s no easy answer, and there may never be a happy outcome.
Today I spent the afternoon with another student, Bobbie, who was very upset because her boyfriend got angry when she talked for a moment in class with another male classmate, so angry that he pushed her down in front of all her classmates. This is not the first time this has happened, and she finds it unacceptable. She has tried to break up with him before because of similar things, but her girl friends always tell her that it’s just a guy's nature. You are crazy to get worked up about some thing as minor as this, they say, it happens all the time. Their own boyfriends are worse and apparently they don't see it as a problem.
She is spending the night here to think things out and be away from him. Apparently, though, her roommates told him where she was, because around 10:30 he showed up outside our apartment, buzzing the door and calling her name. She told him on the intercom that she felt safe here and wanted him to leave and didn’t want to be with him any longer. It is going to be tough for her, though, because her friends think she is wrong to leave him. They share all the same classes together.
Other than this I have had a relatively quiet weekend with the children. Last night we had a shared Mexican meal. I had just put on a pot of beans when Scott called and in passing mentioned that he was craving some Mexican food, so we combined forces. He made Spanish rice and tortillas while I made the beans and salsa. He also did the spicing for me, improving on what I had begun. We had a great meal and it was fun to work together; he used my pan, I used their blender, etc. They got quite a kick out of Taalan’s lament that there weren't enough tortillas as he scarfed down his third big burrito.
Emily and I are going to have Chinese classes together three times a week. Scott is way ahead of us, so he may have a separate teacher. Our new teacher is a friend of Mr. Zhu's who speaks little or no English. It will be interesting. I haven't met the man yet, but Emily is not convinced that it will work. We do want to try however. I am also learning Tariqa's characters, and Scott and Emily are sitting in on some of the second-grade classes.
I am still teaching English to the business men and women. I was going to tell them that I would have to stop, but I enjoy the lessons so much that I couldn't do that. I said that I may only be able to do it once or twice a week after I start teaching, depending on how tired I am and how many hours I have to teach each day. They understood.
Nights are still a challenge getting to sleep without you by my side. Sometimes I get a little desperate. A sign of my desperation is that I completely cleaned the kitchen yesterday. I washed all the shelves, even the top one, and reorganized everything. The children wisely went outside to play and let me loose on my own in the kitchen until I was finished. It did make watching the beans easy, though, because I was in the kitchen for about four hours while they were cooking.
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