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!