I think my favorite thing about living in Shanghai is that I learn many things every day that I feel are shaping who I am as a person. I also like the fact that when I wake up in the morning, I never know exactly what is going to happen that day and where I might be having dinner or who I might be having a conversation with later that evening. These past two weeks have exemplified these attributes of life in Shanghai.
I am convinced that fall in Shanghai lasts about two weeks. When Andy’s parents were here it was still slightly too hot and less than two weeks later it is now slightly too cold. Four miserable months of ridiculously hot summer followed by two weeks of fall. Go figure. Anyway, the months we would traditionally know as fall continue to be busy, but exciting.
Last Sunday, it was a perfect day for sailing and I actually steered the boat for the first time. It will be a long time until I can steer and handle the main sail at the same time, but it was nice to at least start to get a feel for steering the boat.
After a wonderful day sailing, we had dinner with some people in the sailing club at a British restaurant/pub. I spent much of the dinner talking to a Turkish woman who has been teaching mathematics in Shanghai for about a year and a half. She had a lot of interesting things to say about her Chinese students including the fact that they are brilliant mathematicians who make very few mistakes. We also had an eye-opening (for me) conversation about foreigners learning the language of the country they live in. This topic is of particular interest to me because I have heard far too many stories on CNN lately where Americans are complaining about Mexicans living in the United States and not speaking English. I have long known that I disagreed with this point of view but never had a logical rebuttal. Apparently in Europe, the same “problem” has surfaced where people from Turkey leave to countries like Germany in search of higher-paid jobs. Then even after living in the country for five or more years the Turkish people do not speak German and some Germans were complaining about this (sounds familiar?) As we dug into the topic further she had some enlightening insight into the issue.
Imagine that you live in a country where jobs pay a quarter of that paid by jobs in the neighboring country. Now, imagine you could really use the additional money and then have an opportunity to work in the neighboring country. You take the job and move there. The job that you have in the new country is hard, physical labor and your coworkers speak your language (not that of the country you are now working in.) For 10-12 hours a day, you speak your native tongue. At the end of your long day filled with physical labor, you are exhausted and want to go home and eat dinner and sleep. Even when you do have time learn the language of your host country, you are exhausted and would rather rest. Besides, your education is likely less than a high school degree and you may not have been properly taught how to learn before you exited the education system. You probably find your new surroundings intimidating and it is easier and more comfortable for your social group to be filled with people from your home country. When you are with your friends, you talk about the peculiarities of your new country and share ideas for how to survive there.
This scenario seems quite likely in both the Turkey/Germany and Mexico/United States situations. I myself have a masters degree and know how to learn and yet only speak basic Mandarin after a year in China. Learning the language of the country I am living in is something that is important to me so I make the effort to at least try to learn but I also have the financial means to pay for language lessons. In short, I have chosen to try and learn Mandarin (and Spanish when we lived in Mexico) and my situations have allowed me to do this, but they have been personal decisions which are definitely not universally made by expatriates. Now I know that this topic is much more complicated than what I have presented and deals with immigration and taxes and so on, but I simply wanted to present one side of the issue. Okay, stepping off my soapbox.
There have been a lot of visitors at work lately and we have enjoyed entertaining them. We also have been fortunate to have our friend Stefan, who was Andy’s family’s German foreign exchange student back when Andy was in high school, and his girlfriend Christine visiting us this past week. They are very adventurous and have already found their way through Beijing, Xi’an and another town before coming to visit us in Shanghai. They have been a lot of fun and it is amazing how brave they are going out and finding things on their own with only the Lonely Planet to guide them. Stefan and Christine have enjoyed the “not like the rest of China” aspect of Shanghai and have been thrilled to eat at the typical places where we eat rather than insisting on Chinese food (which is definitely not our standard meal) as well as doing the things that we really do in our day-to-day life rather than visiting the few temples and cultural sites that exist in Shanghai. They figured they saw the culture in Beijing and Xi’an.
Friday night we had a nice dinner and then wanted to show Stefan and Christine the “famous” Shanghai night life. We met a couple of my friends at Zapatas, one of the “places to be” on a weekend night. It is actually a Mexican restaurant in the hip, bar-area of town that has quite the happening bar scene after 10pm on the weekends. The night-life is one of the things that Shanghai is famous for and it is pretty crazy. For example at Zapatas, they allow people from the crowd to get up on the bar and dance, Coyote Ugly style. There are always a wide variety of people to meet any time we have gone “out on the town” and Friday night did not disappoint.
Cathy chopping vegetables for jiaozi in our kitchen
My friend Cathy is studying to take the TOEFL exam (English as a Foreign Language) and so almost every day we discuss vocabulary words both in English and Mandarin. We have come to the conclusion that Mandarin has a heck of a lot of measure words (and words for family relations such as cousins, aunts, etc.) and English has a lot of words to describe animals. I had never thought of how many different words we have to describe deer, for example: deer, doe, buck, fawn, etc. I guessed that maybe these words have come about with the evolution of hunting and the need to differentiate which animal you have permission to kill, but I am really not sure why so many words exist.
Wednesday a bunch of the expat women learned to make Christmas cards from our very crafty friend Tiffany. I had no idea how elaborate homemade cards could be and was amazed by the process of embossing. Andy actually thought the cards I made had been purchased (and they were nothing compared to what my more crafty friends can do.)
Our friend Patrik saw a woman outside of our apartment complex, praying to a decorative female statue that is in the gardens of the complex. We talked about it and our first response was to laugh wondering why she was doing that. Then after a little more thought, we wondered if it wasn’t really just the same thing that we each have done in our respective churches over the years. Funny how what sometimes seems so strange and different might really be nearly the same thing that you do yourself.
After my Saturday yoga class both last week and this week, I showered at the yoga studio because I was meeting people for lunch directly after the class. One of the ayis (maids) at the studio apparently finds how I get ready very fascinating and was wiping the same area on the counter for minutes on end while staring at me watching me put on make up and blow dry my hair. I wasn’t sure if I should just ignore her or what.
This evening, my friends Cathy and Ava and Ava’s boyfriend came to our house to teach Stefan, Andy, Christine and I how to make jiaozi, a traditional Chinese snack/meal. It is a pretty involved process. In short, we cooked and shelled shrimp; diced meat; diced various types of vegetables; mixed the diced ingredients together to make filling; prepared dough, cut the dough in small pieces and rolled it out to be used as the shell of the jiaozi; filled the dough with the filling mixture and then finally boiled the entire thing. They turned our really well and we had a lot of fun learning how to make them and spending time together. We also added a meat cleaver to our kitchen utensil collection as it is necessary to chop the meat. I think Ava was appalled at some of the things our kitchen lacked, which just goes to show how differently each country’s kitchens are stocked due to the different dishes which are necessary to prepare in a particular culture. I did convert her to the Pampered Chef food chopper and want to get her one when I am in Boise in December.
I started reading a book that is quite controversial in China called Wild Swans. It is about three generations of Chinese women. The first generation (the author’s grandmother) was a warlord’s concubine in the early part of the 1900s. Her daughter (the author’s mother) was an active part of the Communist revolution. The author grew up in the Cultural Revolution and then moved to England and wrote the book. I have only just started but am already finding it fascinating. It is absolutely incredible to learn how many changes have taken place in this country in only three generations! More on this as I read more, but I can already tell that I will highly recommend the book.
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