Traditional Chinese Medicine & Elizabethan Theatre
24 Sep 2009 1 Comment
in Teaching Tags: alchemy, Bartleby, Bee-Bee, chi, death, Drama, education, fate, freedom, Gee, Julius Caesar, life, Literature, madness, magic, Project Gutenberg, Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare, TCM, The Congo, theatre, Traditional Chinese Medicine, tragedy, troll, undead, Vachal Lindsay, yin and yang
With 16 teaching hours per week and a four day weekend it seemed that I had an abundance of free time. There were no office hours required, but I provided nine hours during evenings throughout the week for students wanting to talk about literature, culture, or life. It had to be evenings because the studentry were in classes all day long, day after day. But despite this I was practically on sabbatical.
I had the free time to get literary, practice yoga, explore grimy Chenzhou, and plan my upcoming Tibet expedition. I contacted the Xiangnan University medicine school faculty to meet with them for a tour of their facilities, and learn about the Chinese health care system. It would make for another podcast. And I researched online. Research was the first step to finding out what I wanted to learn and explore.
Before I contacted the medicine school, I acquainted myself with Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). The internet enabled me to consult the starry forest of the night, and find homeostatic balance between yin and yang, anima and animus. The stars aligned and those who had the sight could decipher them and see the interrelationship between the macrocosmos and the microcosmos. I felt chi flow around me, through me. But I was not a Jedi yet.
Being a Highly Respectable Foreigner with Chinese Characteristics
29 Aug 2009 1 Comment
in Traveling Tags: Gee, history, laowai, traffic
You like spicy food? You know how use chopsticks? You know Chinese President Hu Jintao?
Of course I do. Chinese people are so easy to impress. Either their expectations are very low, or I just don’t fit the mold of a stereotypical American.
A college mathematics student at a party told me that while hanging out in Beijing and Shanghai she was amazed at the ignorance of foreigners pouring into the country without knowing the current president or the role Deng Xiaoping (kind of pronounced like “Dung show—rhymes with plow—ping”) played in the Reform and Opening of China. Of course everybody knows Chairman Mao Zedong. But to know that under Deng Xiaoping’s leadership the People’s Republic of China took its first steps towards modernization—and he’s why Americans and other Westerners are now allowed in China in the first place—to know something of this is to earn beaucoup street cred. If life was a video game then my Mianzi (prestige and face) status bar would be at full strength.
The Only Westerner in Town
