A new test for Job

(actually the prompt was to find some new way to comfort him)

Village Shanghai

We stayed (first time with Airbnb) in a very artistically converted back room/yard of an old housing complex on 巨鹿路 Julu Street in the former French Concession and I found I didn't need to take the subway at all. Within walking distance, often on our very block, were the Japanese restaurant we went to Friday night, Saturday's fancy noodle

and Yunnan specialty restaurants and Sunday's Sichuan sizzle (below), as well as the Catholic church I attended Sunday morning. A short walk away were an Australian bakery cafe, an English language bookstore - and even a Starbucks. I only hopped on the subway to have a dutiful look at the skyline and soon fled the crowds back to our leafy village!

魔都上海

City of illusions... insiders know that the view over 苏州河 Suzhou Creek is even more magical than that across the busy 黄埔 Huangpu River.

Raté

Just a weekend back in Shanghai, and staying in a different part of town than last time, but memories are jogged anyway. The menu page above brings back the struggle of keeping vegetarian in China. (I gave up.) And this page from a recent book by the Shanghai-based French cartoonist P'tite Lu brings back the frustration of trying to use the Chinese you've painstakingly learned with real people... (I won't give up!)

高铁到上海

Time for a trip to Shanghai! The high speed train took us from Beijing, back in its crepuscular murk, through smog-misty mountains in Shandong and eventually offered some almost bluish skies in Jiangsu... Everywhere there's building, even of temples! Shanghai's erstwhile French Concession, where we're staying, seems a vestige of a simpler time.

 

颐和园

There's one great Beijing sight I've put off seeing, the Summer Palace. Glad I waited! On our first day of clear blue skies I was able to go, and, since Renmin is near, I was able to get there before the heat (and tourists) arrived. With landscapes of many kinds, it's added a third dimension to my view of Beijing.

These images are completely out of sequence - sorry! But they're true at least to my experience wandering without a map, discovering one gorgeous vista after another.

Rainy views

From my 3rd floor apartment window, the street lashed to a roiling boil, and in the hallway outside my classroom 30 minutes later.

此何遽不為福乎

How does the story of Job sound to Chinese ears? Any Chinese analogs? A first reference is the ill-fated poet Qu Yuan, a long suffering righteous man who even composed a series of Questions to Heaven; more about him anon. But there's also the frontiersman whose tale is told in the Daoist collection Huainanzi, and who lives on in the saying 塞翁失马焉知非福: Sai Weng lost his horse, who's to say that's not good?

As for the revolutions and mutual generation of calamity and good fortune, their alterations are difficult to perceive. At the near frontier, there was a [family of] skilled diviners whose horse suddenly became lost among the Hu [people]. Everyone consoled them. The father said, 'This will quickly turn to good fortune!' After several months, the horse returned with a fine Hu steed. Everyone congratulated them. The father said, 'This will quickly turn to calamity!' The household was [now] replete with good horses; the son loved to ride, [but] he fell and broke his leg. Everyone consoled them. The father said, 'This will quickly turn to good fortune!' After one year, the Hu people entered the frontier in force; the able and strong all stretched their bowstrings and fought. Among the peoplee of the near frontier, nine out of ten died. It was only because of lameness that father and son protected each other. Thus,
             good fortune becoming calamity,
              calamity becoming good fortune;
              their transformations are limitless,
              so profound they cannot be fathomed.

淮南子 §18.7

Dropping in

The direct flight from New York to Beijing flies over the North Pole, which drives otherwise helpful flight navigation programs crazy! Depending on winds and weather, the course apparently sometimes is presented as if westward, sometimes - as today - as if eastward.) Global thinking is hard. Cylinder-earthers seem still a type of flat-earthers!

北京的蓝空气

 Blue sky - it happens!

Decanting

An intensive summer course really is intensive: in what seems like no time at all, we've finished four of our eight classes, fourteen hours of instruction! Students have submitted midterm (!) essays, which are, from an initial scan, pretty good. When I've read all of them I'll be in a better position to describe just what a heavy lift it is for Chinese non-humanities students to have to write about not just any religious text but the Book of Job - and in a second language, to boot! Still, our class isn't as intensive as some, which meet 3 times or even 4 times a week (also at 3.5 hours a pop!).

I chose the four-week format because I wanted time to explore Beijing between classes (and Shanghai next weekend), and have been doing pretty well, despite heat and rain. Today I went to the vast National Museum on Tiananmen Square and was enchanted all over again by the first stirrings of Chinese civilization. (I knew from my last visit to head for the ancient China floor below, not the revolutionary history floor above.) Three-legged containers go way back, and already early achieve a striking beauty, like the perhaps 3500-year-old bronze 爵 jue wine vessel above. It's from the 二里头文化 Erlitou culture, and was found just outside Luoyang in the Yellow River valley. How nice that that's my destination once the Renmin gig is over, just two weeks hence.

Jagged

Funny stone on the Renmin University campus (with one of a token few traditional looking pavilions among the drab blocks of offices and classrooms). I can't tell whether it's partly or entirely man-made. Does it matter?

智化寺

Found my way to Zhihau Temple, the most significant surviving cluster of Ming dynasty wooden buildings in Beijing. Much of the Buddhist statuary is gone, and two of the building's spectacular caisson ceilings are in America (one I've seen, in the Philadelphia Museum of Art), but a remarkable hexagonal sutra storage cabinet somehow survived, presided over by a statue of Vairocana perched in a little heaven of his own. The tourists in a Chinese group being dragged around the premises seemed less interested in this than in the sci-fi scene of Zaha Hadid's Galaxy SOHO complex looming nearby. (Yes, the sky was that color.)

 

北京大学-赛克勒考古与艺术博物馆

 

After class (I teach 8:00-11:30am) and lunch with some students, I braved the unceasing rain to check out the Beijing University Sackler Museum of Archaeology and Art, well worth the slog. What wonders await beneath the surface of this storied land.

Rainy season

Today was rainy, often torrential. So much rain fell so quickly that roads and sidewalks became rivers, intersections lakes. Once I accepted I'd be wading it was almost fun, until I got home and found my rubber flipflops had splashed dirty water all over my back. Thank goodness the apartment has a washing machine!

Embassy of Taishan

These mountain spirits are among 100s of plaster figures attending the various "departments" of the Daoist temple complex Dongyue 东岳庙. The entire cast of the Eastern Sacred Mountain Taishan is represented, though only five of the statues are originals that survived the Cultural Revolution.

圆明园 Yuanmingyuan

Spent much of today (more than planned!) at the old summer palace - what's left of it, after it was razed by French and British soldiers after
the second Opium War, looted for new buildings and given a final push by the cultural revolution. Long abandoned, it's recently been restored

and offers endless carefully planned vistas, some intimate and others vast (Hangzhou's West Lake is evoked), usually with the foundation of a lost pavilion created to savor each one's beauty. In this season, many a pond is brimming over with lotuses, some taller than a person. Among the few surviving ruins are the carved stone of early fusion European baroque palaces from the mid 18th century, fabulously romantic!

Metalic

A first foray into the city Friday took me to the newish art district called Today 今天艺术汇, where sculptures like these command attention.

Hello again!

Not quite a week in, and everything’s fallen nicely into place. I’ve moved out of the hotel, where most of the International Summer School faculty are housed, into an apartment maintained by my host department for its foreign visitors. They put me up here once before, so it has the further advantage of being familiar - which affords me comforts from a washing machine to a kitchen which even has a toaster! The department has also given me use of an office, and the brilliant and indefatigable graduate student who is my assistant has engineered a workaround for the blockage between the university wifi and the VPN that gets my laptop over the Great Firewall! That just happened yesterday, so I’m finally able to return to this blog. Hello!

It’s my first time back in China after the year I spent in Shanghai, and it’s fun to remember and rediscover what life is like here. (Plantings tend all to be the same flower or plant, for example.) Not all fun, though. Air pollution is down, but the sky’s been one or other shade of greyish or yellowish white the whole time I’ve been here. This added to the confusion of my jetlagged consciousness; as my body told me a day was starting or ending, when in fact the day was ending or starting, the light outside was always the same. On Wednesday I confidently reported that my jetlag was subsiding... I'm doing better now (Saturday)!

The international summer school at Renmin (People's) University, of which I'm part, celebrates is tenth anniversary this year. Sixty-odd foreign professors join Renmin faculty, teaching in a variety of fields, almost all in English. (I'm in the small Humanities curriculum.) All Renmin undergraduates are required to take one of the classes in English. My thirty-one students hail from departments most of which we don't have at New School - Business, Human Relations, Statistics, Demographics, Journalism and Law. A handful are in Comparative Literature, and one in Philosophy. (I sense humanities are a little neglected at Renda.) What might the "literature of suffering" mean to them, let alone Job? I'm eager to find out!

Pe(e)king over the wall

Greetings from China! Four days in I'm doing fine, jet lag subsiding steadily. The reason you haven't heard from me, and for the brevity of this post, too, is that Internet access is an ongoing headache. I hope to have something sorted out in another day or two (or three). If problems persist I'll do what I'm doing now, use my phone, which isn't having anything like the trouble my laptop is, but makes writing painfully slow.

My course, by the way, started yesterday. I'm very excited finally to have the chance to teach Chinese undergraduates, and the thirty-one intrepid souls who signed up for a summer school course called "Interpreting the Literature of Suffering" look to be excited, too. Our eight 210 minute sessions already seem like hardly enough...!

East meets West

I fly tonight for Beijing, and five weeks in China - teaching and travel.VPN permitting I'll be able to keep the blog fed but you never know...