Friday, January 30, 2015
Thursday, January 29, 2015
Banfa
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Wednesday, January 28, 2015
Tuesday, January 27, 2015
Tour of the country
My two days tagging along as a delegation from Fudan visited sights in Jiangxi Province at the invitation of a local worthy were enjoyable in all sorts of expected and unexpected ways. (The four day trip was abbreviated because of people's schedules.) Some snaps...
We came by overnight train (11 hrs) in an old Soviet-style sleeping car.
Jiangxi is poor but full of beautiful, nearly wild landscapes.
My suite in a hotel closed for the season but open for our host's friends.
Our first trip was to another of our host's projects, a free range chicken farm in a mountain vale. The languid Chinese lute music provided by occasional transistor radios was drowned out by the fowls' gossip about us - or maybe they sensed that three of them would star in our lunch.
Cultural pride on display in an artisanal highway toll plaza.
The picturesque terraces at Yuyuan are yellow and purple in Spring.
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Across the valley, the town of Huangling, which you already know, in mid-transition to becoming a heritage destination. The villagers don't live here anymore, but the basking trays are carefully maintained.
The land here is poor for agriculture but rich in wood.
Inside one of the most impressive houses.
Shrine to an ancient tree; some in the area are 1000+ years old.
Pretty river scene
Shop floor of our host's shoe factory
Rugged mountains
Characteristically opulent meal (giant fish dish yet to arrive)
Gate of Ehu, a school which started its life in the 8th century as a Chan temple. Eight centuries ago it played host to a famous debate involving Zhuxi, one of the founders of Neo-Confucianism.
More of Ehu
Trip home was by bullet train (under 3 hrs). Shangrao's station's is less than a month old (Guangzhou-Shanghai line), so hard of vehicular access and not yet served by my cell phone operator.
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The picturesque terraces at Yuyuan are yellow and purple in Spring.
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Across the valley, the town of Huangling, which you already know, in mid-transition to becoming a heritage destination. The villagers don't live here anymore, but the basking trays are carefully maintained.
The land here is poor for agriculture but rich in wood.
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Shrine to an ancient tree; some in the area are 1000+ years old.
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Pretty river scene
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Trip home was by bullet train (under 3 hrs). Shangrao's station's is less than a month old (Guangzhou-Shanghai line), so hard of vehicular access and not yet served by my cell phone operator.
Monday, January 26, 2015
Baskin' in Huangling
Greetings from Wuyuan 婺源, which fancies itself "the most beautiful country in China." This old town (called Huangling 篁岭) is pretty fetching, I have to admit - and this picture doesn't show that it faces across the valley a mazelike landscape of terraces. More pictures, and more about the color disks (chilis, pumpkin slices, maize, etc., put out to "bask"), when I get back to Shanghai tomorrow. (Yes, tomorrow: the trip to the country's been truncated. But I think 48 hours will be plenty.)
Sunday, January 25, 2015
Sojourn in the country
I might not be able to post on this blog for the next few days - I'm joining a little caravan of Chinese historians from the institute hosting me here on a little trip into neighboring provinces. I sort of know where
we're going, well, when I insisted, someone drew me this map. I believe our destinations include the charming village where Zhuxi (Chu-Hsi) was born, an old school, and a small sacred Daoist mountain. We'll see!
we're going, well, when I insisted, someone drew me this map. I believe our destinations include the charming village where Zhuxi (Chu-Hsi) was born, an old school, and a small sacred Daoist mountain. We'll see!
Saturday, January 24, 2015
广富林遗址公园
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Here are a few of my photos. Guangfulin is a big area with 5000 years of historical artifacts. We were in the "Relic Park," which is just about ready to open as a kind of theme park of Chinese culture, and will offer a Ming-style island along with its Tang temple, old halls of various kinds, commemorative carvings, futuristic museums... Some of its new halls are designed to look like they're submerged, but I was particularly charmed by public lavatories designed to look like a ruined bridge.
Friday, January 23, 2015
Bday
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Thursday, January 22, 2015
Three begot the ten thousand things
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But that doesn't really describe the magic of what was going on. With M were his Catalunyan wife E (also a dancer) and their five-month-old daughter. E's Chinese is good, M's workable and beautifully accented, mine baby-steps. The Institute folks didn't speak English but the deputy, it suddenly emerged, is fluent in German - he spent two years at hospitals there, the first European country to take qigong seriously as medicine and even to include it in national health insurance. So our conversation swirled around in Chinese, English, occasional volleys of German - and the international language of baby love. At first E translated Chinese-English but eventually we realized we were getting by pretty well without it!
The Institute is 30 this year, and as I came in the Director was just unrolling some congratulatory calligraphy an 85-year-old retired professor had sent them. One was a text from the Zhuangzi, the other, in the glorious script of the most ancient Chinese inscriptions, the opening of chapter 42 of the Daodejing. We visitors marveled. It somehow completed the moment when, a little later, in a book M had been given by some researchers in Hong Kong, I found an English translation of Daodejing 42, and passed it to the Chinese, who puzzled through it with a kind of perplexed delight. It was something like this:
Tao begot one.
One begot two.
Two begot three.
And three begot the Ten Thousand Things.
The Ten Thousand Things carry yin and embrace yang.
I have a feeling we're all going to be very good friends!
Wednesday, January 21, 2015
Shēngdiào
My Chinese teacher Susan (the one who laughs with me) has decided that I've made unexpected and sudden progress in my 声调 shengdiao, my tones. Not in recognizing them (that's often still like guessing in a cantron exam for me), but in pronouncing them. If I know what tone I'm pronouncing, I can apparently give it just the right spin! What did I do, she asked? I might have said: you asked me to practice telling a paragraph from a fairy tale, and exaggerated pronunciation seems less contrived here. What I said was: 因为我感冒了!yinwei wo ganmoa le (because I caught a cold). But the real reason, I think, isn't what I did
but what she's been doing. She's taken me systematically through all twelve different combinations of tones - you'll be as appalled as I was to learn that the tones change in combination - composing the materials herself. (Above is an example, third tone followed by second.) After we go through them she records them and sends me the sound files to imitate. I've still got miles to go but I'm in good hands! 多谢,老师!
but what she's been doing. She's taken me systematically through all twelve different combinations of tones - you'll be as appalled as I was to learn that the tones change in combination - composing the materials herself. (Above is an example, third tone followed by second.) After we go through them she records them and sends me the sound files to imitate. I've still got miles to go but I'm in good hands! 多谢,老师!
Tuesday, January 20, 2015
Sensitive but Unclassified
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Monday, January 19, 2015
Communist youth
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When I got home, an old high school had posted (on FaceBook) some photos she'd turned up from a Hallowe'en party back in the day (1980, anyone?). I reposted this one on WeChat, to which I'd early posted some images from the Youth League place, with the caption 我也小的时候
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Sunday, January 18, 2015
369 days
Rats, I missed the anniversary of my starting Chinese! That happened January 14th last year. Who would have thought I'd come so far? Not that I'm that far. I've started volume 4 of New Practical Chinese, so am roughly where students in intensive college classes are at the start of their fourth semester. Not bad! But conversations remain halting at best. But there are starting to be some... Now, can I write that in pu tong hua?! Let's see.
上星期四是我开始学习汉语的第一周年纪念,可是我忘记了!是去年一月十四号在纽约的China Institute的。我的进步真的不少。但汉语水平还没有太高。我现在读New Practical Chinese第四篇呢,跟美国很好大学里的第二年第二学期差不多。没不好! 可是跟中国人说话的话我说得还不流利。重要是,那种说话越来越多!
上星期四是我开始学习汉语的第一周年纪念,可是我忘记了!是去年一月十四号在纽约的China Institute的。我的进步真的不少。但汉语水平还没有太高。我现在读New Practical Chinese第四篇呢,跟美国很好大学里的第二年第二学期差不多。没不好! 可是跟中国人说话的话我说得还不流利。重要是,那种说话越来越多!
Friday, January 16, 2015
Mind the gape
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Yes, I wrote down those locutions - but as much in humility as amusement. The strange escapades of vowels when some French folks speak English may be the closest thing to what folks like me sound like to Chinese speakers when we mangle our tones. And maybe we are finally understood best by listeners who can hear the first language behind the second...
Thursday, January 15, 2015
Beyond belief!
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The talk was entitled "Theater and Ritual: Worlds of "Make-Believe" but theater and ritual turned out to be just part of a larger argument about how we should think about religion in the wake of new research on all the ways religion isn't about "belief." I set up the problem with recent studies of the American religious landscape, ranging from survey ignorance of one's own tradition and moralistic therapeutic deism to the "fake it til you make it" character of practices described by T. M. Luhrmann by way of SBNR and religious "nones." Can we make sense of all this without falling into categories of ignorance and self-delusion? I suggested that "lived religion" responds to these challenges but devoted the talk to my more far-flung experiments with new models: religion and theater, religion and fashion, and the online recipe network model too! (Along the way I also told the story of mizuko in America to give a transnational dimension, attention to ritual, and a reminder that religion engages serious issues - this, too, told as a "bottom up" story.)
Religion winds up being a community of people asking similar questions, testing and trading believable responses (not all or most of them in the form of beliefs), collaborating in various complicated ways as they produced and performed a livable world - you know what I think. The Q&A was illuminating, too. Was my approach Durkheimian? Was I just discussing "folk religion"? Or "civil religion"? Is belief harder than it used to be? What were my students like, and what did were they supposed to get out of the Religion & Theater course? What were my thoughts about the alleged "deprivatization" of religion described by my erstwhile New School colleague José Casanova? And did I think society could survive without religion? I fudged all those questions, of course.
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Wednesday, January 14, 2015
Tuesday, January 13, 2015
Dream on
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Monday, January 12, 2015
Tea time
Some friends invited me to join them at a "Tibetan tea tasting/ ceremony" in the former French Concession. A tea trader from Sichuan they had met somewhere treated us to a few choice teas (he has 300),
each dispensed in tiny cups over many pourings, each pouring a subtly different experience. It was in a quasi "secret" location tucked away behind a fruit stand. The photo at top is the view out its door.
These little blocks of a compressed Pu Ehr-like tea yielded the cup below, in perhaps its sixth pouring. Enthused the trader as we left (after 2.5 hours): we're only halfway, you could spend five hours with this tea!
each dispensed in tiny cups over many pourings, each pouring a subtly different experience. It was in a quasi "secret" location tucked away behind a fruit stand. The photo at top is the view out its door.
These little blocks of a compressed Pu Ehr-like tea yielded the cup below, in perhaps its sixth pouring. Enthused the trader as we left (after 2.5 hours): we're only halfway, you could spend five hours with this tea!
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