The old grey mare...

So, for no particular reason I've decided to take up my keyboard and post on my dusty blog. Because of this complete lack of any kind of reason I'm also focusing this blog entry on things my mother would be most interested in.

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Chief among these right now is, of course, her grandson, Lucas (or, as I like to call him, the Grand Overlord of All He Surveys at Least in His Own Mind – GOAHSLHOM for short). We're closing in on his second birthday and he is in full-tilt "Terrible Twos" mode. Now to be fair he's better-behaved than other two year olds I've encountered. He is, however, incredibly active and hard to manage for a variety of reasons:

• he is hypercurious about everything (the more dangerous or annoying the better);
• he is much larger than other children his age;
• he is commensurately strong.

When he wants something it takes the concerted effort of Joan and her mother together to rein him in (or just me since I'm still the giant in the family).

He is, in a word, annoying.

The annoyance is mitigated, however by the sheer joy of watching him develop (and, in my case, the sheer joy of warping his mind for my own amusement). The initial health scare is gone. Lucas is a big, healthy, active, normal child in every sense. He's developing manual skills (some of them annoying – my desk drawers are no longer sacrosanct). He's developing very good listening comprehension skills in both English and Chinese. (We often underestimate how much he understands now!) His spoken skills are pretty good; he can communicate most things quite clearly now (and boy does he like to communicate them constantly!). He can recognize about 75% of the alphabet without error and about half of the remainder with about 50% accuracy. (He still confuses "N", "M" and "W" mind.) He's memorized a couple of Tang Dynasty poems (remember those from your childhood, Mom?) and is even at the point of beginning to recognize some Chinese characters in context (but not independently yet).

Some of the interesting character traits he's developing:

• he's absolutely obsessed with cars and has been from an amazingly young age;
• he loves Dora the Explorer (the TV show and the books);
• he's recently developed a love of the ridiculous rhymes of Dr. Seuss (There's a Wocket in my Pocket! being his current favourite book edging out by a hair the illustrated version of The Itsy Bitsy Spider);
• he likes to play hide and seek and is both remorseless and tireless while playing it;
• when he's tired he doesn't get whiny and cry, he gets crazy and runs around like a manic idiot;
• he's an extremely picky eater (obviously acquired from Joan, not me!);
• he likes music and will dance to it all the time, sometimes even managing to look cute instead of spastic;
• his first favourite song was, of all things, "Iron Man" which has given me one of my favourite images of all times: an elderly Chinese lady humming "Iron Man" to a young baby to soothe him;
• a current favourite song is the theme song to the old television show Night Court although I recently introduced him (by accident) to "Squeeze Box" which he also enjoys.
  

I do have a lot of new pictures of him and will post them as soon as possible, but some technical problems are interfering with this at the moment. When those are cleared, I'll make a new blog entry that consists almost entirely of Lucas photos.

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The next person that Mom's going to be interested about is, of course, Joan. Joan is doing well, but this term bit off (quite a) bit more than she could chew work-wise and is worn to a frazzle. I, of course, told her this was a mistake long before she started into teaching 30 periods per week—over and above the whole parenting thing, mind—but nobody ever listens to me until it's too late. Still, this term is ending soon and next term she won't be making this same mistake. He won't come out and admit that I was right, but we both know that I was.

Joan is still the chief driving force behind us wanting to buy an apartment in Wuhan. This is proving more difficult than we had anticipated because the Chinese mortgage industry, like most large-scale operations in China, is run by untrained chimpanzees with bladder control problems. (They don't know what they're doing, are unsuited to their positions and like to piss on everything around them.) The size of the down payment we need to make is just too large to be realistic so I'm going to have to go hunting for a better-paid job or start a successful business or something. (Alternatively I could win the lottery or something. It's hard to do when you don't buy tickets, however.) We're still working at it though, even through the added expense of a personified force of destruction (a.k.a. 王森锐 or Lucas) in the household. Indeed it is for Lucas (giving him a stable home in his childhood) that we're going through this. It'd just be nice to get it done earlier.

Other things Joan-related: she's on her way to getting her Master's degree in teaching, get this, Chinese as a Foreign Language. This is our entry plan for Canada. Given the giant China has become on the world stage there's a lot of places itching to have their staff trained in Chinese. Further a lot of overseas Chinese are interested in having their children learn their "mother" tongue. This is beside the obvious possibility of government interest in native Chinese speakers. There's lots of opportunity for the future in this and Joan's working hard at it.

(Anybody want to learn Chinese from Joan so she can get some praxis?)

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This leads to me, the last person my mother is interested in hearing about in our little family over here in China. My family life is going fine, although two sudden adjustments (bachelor-to-husband, husband-to-father) in rapid succession after 40 years of solitude was a bit of a shock (to put it mildly). As you may have gathered from the above, I'm insanely fond (and proud!) of my son despite the annoyances and worse of parenthood. (Oh, Mom? I apologize unreservedly.) Pretty much anything I do these days is for him, short- or long-term.

My work life is far improved at my new school, the Hubei Communication Technical College. This is not what one would call a high-rung college (more third-string) and as such they lack the arrogance of my previous school which (fraudulently) banks in on the good name of one of the more respected universities in China (Wuhan University). They, as a result, pay me (slightly) better, give me a much nicer (albeit about 10% smaller) apartment and pay all my bills except long distance telephone. That's not the best part, however. The best part is that I'm not just a 白猴子 ("white monkey") to them. I'm a teacher. I'm treated as a teacher and an asset. My opinion is sought out on matters that affect me (and sometimes even on matters that don't affect me). I'm invited to planning meetings. I'm actually encouraged to interact with the Chinese staff! (Three dinners so far and still counting, and this after I had to demure from two because of scheduling conflicts.)

The down side, of course, is my students. Just like the East Lake Campus students of my last school, these students are the dregs of China's educational system. They're entirely unsuited to being in university-level (or even college-level!) education. Unlike my former East Lake students, however, I actually feel for these kids. They're not arrogant, spoiled rich brats on the whole. (There's one exception out of about 100 students.) They're decent human beings who are being forced into something they have no interest in nor aptitude for. (The same is true of my former East Lake students, but I loathed them as human beings so didn't care about their suffering.)

On the other hand, my main campus students at my old school were decent people and, in many cases, people I actively thought had a real future (with several of them proving my predictions correct now!). I have no such students here. Still I'm overall much happier with my work here than I was at the old place so the move was a net plus.

My mother was kind enough to send me a big batch of books for my technical use (she's already sent Lucas about 20...). Because of her I'm now learning how to use ANTLR, Groovy, Scala, Erlang and Haskell (with Clojure on the way in another package) so that I can get my technical skills back up to snuff and ready for a move to high tech. Further, I have prospects, high tech-wise, here in China. One of my former students has talked to his manager about me and that manager is interested. Should things go well, I may be out of teaching next year this time and back into software, this time working for a Chinese company with ... well, I won't give away what it is that they were interested in me for so that I don't jinx the process of being hired. If this happens, though, it will be big. Very big.

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That's it for this blog for now. Hopefully I can get back into the swing of things again (I have a strategy I like to call "mini-blogging" that may help) and not have a three-month gap again. And Mom, for no particular reason I promise that the pictures of Lucas will be up in a blog posting just for you before the week is out.

Delightful Chinglish

I had a fun week with the good students. The subject was idiom and translation—basically an introduction to not speaking Chinglish. Of course it's hard, typically, to find a good example of why learning proper idiomatic expression is important. Luckily I had a secret weapon at my disposal: the packaging of a lock Joan got with her new electric scooter. (I know I promised pictures when we next had good weather. We honestly haven't had any good weather recently. The closest we got was a half-overcast day on Friday and instead of going out for pictures we worried more about things like laundry.)

This lock package has what is probably the most delightful example of how not to do it that I've seen in China. It is absolutely breath-taking in its incomprehensibility. Let me give you a taste:

Quality is our fundamental
Ares locks on a "quality-oriented, good faith for the first" for the purpose of the constant pursuit of true wood products is expected, good looks, so that Every consumer to buy a Heart, and must feel at ease.

Maintenance:
In the course of use, such as the case of Ni Chen debris into the Keyhole, a key rotation or impeded access difficult situation, not to inject viscous – The lubricants, use a small gasoline into Suoxin, and then repeatedly inserted key cleansing, and afterwards in a few keys on the increase Qianfen(pencil Core Mo) can be lubricated.

(Note: all formatting and spelling errors above are verbatim from the package. I made sure there are no transcription errors.)

And so it goes on and on. Splendid, isn't it? It's like the god of bad English descended to make a perfect example for my lessons.

What I initially intended to do turned out to be too difficult, so I had to dumb down the exercise a bit. Originally my plan was to have them try and back-translate the Chinglish into the original Chinese and then translate it properly. It turns out that they couldn't recognize the relevant Chinese idioms and structures when expressed in another language. In the end I had to have someone in the class type out the Chinese on the screen so that they could just do the straightforward one-way translation.

The point of the lesson, of course, was to show that there's an awful lot more to language than mere grammar and vocabulary; that when (not if!) they found themselves having to do business in English with people from around the world they'd better learn idiom as well on top of everything else.

Of course their translations were better than what's on the package. (They'd have to be!) However the exercise highlighted other problems. Aside from the usual bunch of spelling and grammar errors (which aren't really important here since I'm not teaching English majors) there was a big difference in communication style. Their translations were circumlocutory and frustratingly vague with overuse of the passive voice. This is not the favoured language for business communication. Next week's lesson has practically written itself!

One of the questions I asked the classes was "Why is there any English on this package at all?" I got the usual suspects in terms of answers: maybe they want to sell abroad or to foreigners living in China, etc. I did get an interesting thought from one student however. He opined that the English was there to make the company look international to Chinese eyes. If he's right—and he well could be—then the quality of the translation doesn't matter at all. It's intended to wow the rubes, after all, not native speakers. That was food for thought, something I always like getting from my students.

First week of school.

Well, before I talk about my usual boring drivel, let me talk about a shameful thing I have done. I have signed up for Facebook. I resisted it for years, but it finally caught up with me. (Thankfully I've managed to avoid the pressure to sign up for MySpace or LiveJournal!) My blog here gets echoed over to Facebook, but pictures and stuff like that don't show up over there so this blog is still the main point of contact if you want to keep track of things.

The shame aside, this week was my first week of classes in the new year. In a pleasant surprise, I'm now only teaching four hours at the Sweathogs campus and eight hours with the real students. Three out of my four classes in the main campus are my students from last term and the last one is the one I inherited from Virginia after she went home in the middle of last term because of her cancer's sudden and drastic return. (I'll blog on her at some point but right now don't feel like it for reasons which will become obvious when I finally do get around to it.) The two classes at the Sweathogs campus, however, are new to me. They were Gudrun's students (the new teacher who replaced Peter when he ditched for a job that paid over five times as much) last term, but apparently I got them this term and she got at least two of mine from last term. The poor girl.

I really hate having to constantly contrast the two campuses, but really, it doesn't get much more "light and day" in comparison. Out of my four classes at the main campus, each class 27-29 students (except for the one I got from Virginia which weighs in at 39), I had four students missing total and maybe two or three who came in a few seconds late. Out of my two classes at the Sweathogs campus, one class at 24, the other 25 students, I had six students from one class not show up at all and three from the second (plus an additional four who snuck out at break and didn't come back before I closed the door). And I had well over a dozen total who came in late – some of them as much as fifteen minutes late.

You may have spotted that bit about the ones who snuck out at break and didn't make it back in time? Yeah. I'm harsh with those retards this term. And here's the funny thing: I told them I was going to do it. I gave them a single sheet of very simple rules that very clearly stated I would be doing this! It doesn't get much clearer than "the door closes when the bell rings and if you're not in here, you're marked absent". Yet four boys decided to sneak out during the ten minute break to buy breakfast. (Why aren't they buying breakfast before class starts? Well, you got me there. I have no damned idea!)

This term I'm not going to take any bullshit from these cretins. Their marks are divided into 40% for performance in the first half of term and 60% for the second half. I told them that missing class three times means that first mark is 0 and missing class five times means that second mark is also 0. And four boys decided to test it and are 20% of their way to getting zero for the whole course.

God-damned idiots.

At least, however, I get this all over with early in the week. My first class with the Sweathogs is Monday morning and my second is Wednesday. Tuesday, Thursday and Friday mornings are good students and Friday afternoon is my last class of good students. I end the week on a very high double note.

The weather has taken a turn for the colder in this first week. In the two weeks leading up to classes the weather was getting warmer and warmer to the point that we were seeing 25C in the daytime and lows of 11C at night. Now, however, we're getting rain and temperatures that break 10C in the daytime only if we're lucky. I know you guys in Canada are laughing at the notion that this represents cold weather, but let me point out three salient features of this weather: humidity that never goes below 80% and is usually stuck straight up at 100%, medium to high winds and, last but not least, nothing at all is ever insulated so that outside temperature and humidity is pretty much also your inside temperature and humidity. Only the winds get broken. Somewhat. When your crazed wife and her crazed mother aren't opening them all for circulation. (I'm SO in trouble for that now when Joan reads this!)

Still, the weather this winter was a joy compared to last winter. This winter we had the usual two days with snow, none of which stayed on the ground longer than a few hours. It's almost embarrassing that I had a winter jacket, a fleece vest, a pair of winter gloves and a nice wool sweater sent from Canada this year to keep me warm. I mean I put them to good use here and there, but for the most part it was all overkill.

Holiday is almost over.

Well, at least I think it's almost over. This being the Wuhan University International Software School nobody's actually bothered to tell me when my classes begin again. I'm guessing they'll begin on Monday, but undoubtedly I won't be told for sure until Sunday night or something. I think in the three years I've been here the longest lead time for information like this that I've ever received (without digging for it on my own) was three days (and that was for a 2-week intensive course with the same class every day for eight hours! – four semesters of English in two weeks).

I also decided to take a break from the blog over the official holiday, so I have a bit of catching up to do.

One of the first things of interest that happened during the holiday was a student of mine (Li Zefeng) who is one of two people at the Sweathogs Campus that has any worth as a student (and maybe one of six who have worth as human beings)—I am not exaggerating here!—dropped by for a visit. We talked a little about his future plans and goals (something I'll likely bring up in a future blog entry if I run out of family material) and he, naturally, brought gifts: a package with two tins of nice 西湖龙井茶 (West Lake Dragon Well tea—an internationally famed tea), a bag of coconut candies which Joan promptly hid from me and now doles out in small doses and a box of dried black wood ears (a kind of edible fungus, and a tasty kind to boot, but I think they're also considered medicinal). In return for this I gave him some software that will assist him in building the skills that he's not getting at his phony school.

The family did a few visits during this time, but as it's always awkward when I go visit because of the intrinsic clash of the communication barrier vs. the natural Chinese desire to be a good host, I stayed behind most days. Sadly this included a day when Joan and her mother were supposed to be buying a house-warming present for her uncle but she instead went to visit a park with Lucas for most of the day. I have pictures from this that I will be sorting through and uploading for Sunday's returned regular update so hold on for a bit. (Hint: Lucas does his incredibly cute routine again.)

Ah, what the Hell! I'll do that right now!

OK, I'm back. Here are some selected photos of Lucas at the park:

From Lucas

The last interesting thing to happen to me over this holiday was hearing from my half-sister Anne again. "Half-sister?" the two of you who don't already know the story are asking. "What are you talking about?" Let's get into the wayback machine to give some context.

Back when I was 30 years old and living in Ottawa writing software for Pronexus, I got the most surreal telephone call of my life. My mother called up and started saying things that I thought, at first, were a joke. There were only two problems with this theory: this kind of joke is something more that my father would have done (my mother has no discernible sense of humour!), and there was no punchline. The basic story was that six years before I was born my mother had a baby daughter out of wedlock and had immediately put her up for adoption. I won't get into the gory details of all this, but the practical upshot of it all was that I was told at 30 that I had a half-sister six years older than me.

As it so happens, I was the closest person to my newly-(re)surfaced half-sister. I got in touch with her by telephone and then drove my way from Ottawa to Barrie (which reminds me that there's an awful lot of odd synchronicity between me and Barrie) to meet her as the first representative of the family. The meeting went OK, she then went on to visit my mother, the two corresponded for a while.

Then she dropped off the planet.

Now, many years later, my mother asks me if it's OK for "Anne" to get in touch with me. I had by this time almost completely forgotten about this Anne and thought it was weird for her to ask me if my cousin Anne could get in touch with me. (Thought running through my head was "well, duh!") So I told her that there are only two people in the family I didn't want to ever hear from and one of them wasn't even in the family anymore. The rest were more than welcome. Then I found out it was half-sister Anne my mother was speaking about. (Not that this changes anything. There is still only one current family member I don't want to hear from.)

It was interesting to hear that Anne had contacted the rest of the family once again, so I of course looked forward to her email. I almost missed it, however, because changes in Anne's life involved a change in her name. I was looking for an email from Anne Crannie and instead got an email with a subject that looked like it came straight out of a spam artist's from an Anne Howat. For days it sat in my inbox because I was taking it easy for the holidays and didn't really want to wrestle with spam settings and the like, so it took me a while to find out that this was half-sister Anne. Once I did read it, however, of course I rattled off a reply (largely incoherent) and a pointer to this blog.

Thus stands the state of the family. And now that I've had my Spring Festival hiatus, I'll be posting every Sunday(ish) again.

Surreal, Troubling News

So, first things first -- a confession. I've modified the previous two blog entries out of embarrassment. The trees in question aren't plum. They're cherry. They don't look like any cherry tree I've ever seen and they do look like the millions of plum trees I've seen, but it turns out they're a special cherry from Japan given to the university as a gift some time ago. Mea culpa.

Now the surreal news.

One of my old students from 九江 (Jiujiang) asked me if I could help her with interpreting a phrase from a paper. The phrase was about ruling out the kitchen as the source of a fire and other speculation about where the fire could have started. This, to put it mildly, had me both curious and worried.

The phrase was out of context, so she sent me a PDF with the full context. It was a report from a fire department in New Zealand reporting on a fire that had gutted a home with two people upstairs studying. Two Chinese students. One of whom was reported hospitalised. The verdict of the investigation? Origin of fire: "suspicious". In short there was nothing where they identified the fire starting that could have started the fire.

The fire spread through the ground floor of the home rapidly, trapping the two girls, my student one of them, upstairs. They had to escape by jumping out a second-story window. All their belongings were destroyed and my student wound up in hospital for two months with a broken ankle, knee, spine and three ribs. The landlord of the place? Vanished. She was asking me, I think, to confirm that someone didn't try to kill her and her room-mate. This was not confirmation that I could give, having seen the part where it said "police investigation" on the document.

So now she's in China wondering how to proceed. I told her to get her government involved so that the police get cranky at the international interference. This way whoever set that fire will suffer greatly at the hands of police when he's caught and arrested. International incidents tend to make for a lot of paperwork, after all. I also suggested she immediately contact the insurance company listed in the fire department's paper and make a claim stat.

See? My students don't even have to be in China to get into weird, alarming difficulties.

In other news, my AIM address is also no longer in use. Not that anybody contacted me that way ever.

Contrasts (redux).

Other interesting contrasts.

Today the cherry trees in the pictures I put up last time got hit by wind. Flower petals flew around everywhere in a veritable blizzard. It looked truly spectacular -- another one of those moments of sublime beauty that keep me in this country. And along with it came another contrast.

The contrast this time was social, not visual. The students, upon seeing the petal storm, were electrified. My class was utterly and totally disrupted (and I didn't mind, believe me!). The students all ran to the windows, throwing them wide to see more clearly and to allow the petals to come into the classroom. Pandemonium reigned for a few moments as they took in the sight and, in many cases, broke out their mobile phones to snap pictures.

Not just the girls. The boys were just as ga-ga over flowers.

I think back to my school days and I can't find even a single memory of a boy who'd publicly go ga-ga over flowers. Here it's perfectly normal. Tough, seasoned warriors in ancient Chinese novels weep at the sight of gorgeous blooms. It's just the way life is here, and to me, the outsider, it's truly a wonder to behold.

First Week Ruminations

The first week back is always fun (in the ironic sense of that last word). Lots of things have to come together all at once:

• I have to get used to waking up at 6AM every day again.
• I have to figure out where my classes actually are (as opposed to where I've been told they are).
• I have to re-introduce myself to my students because, as with students anywhere in the world, they've forgotten everything they learned prior to their long vacation.
• I have to get back into the whole "delivering information" mode that's atrophied over a month of disuse.

After five years of this, though, this all becomes increasingly easy. (Except for that first item.)

So, this week I just did a mostly teacher-talk lesson. I had to go over the previous exam and identify the strong points (many!) and the weak points (only two) the students had. I also started off the extracurricular activities I have planned for this term -- in effect replacing the school's anemic "English Corner" with one that the students actually want to attend. And, finally, I went over a brief look at what was happening this term. (The secret words are "public speaking".)

One thing I've found I really like with this batch of students is their eagerness overall. In five of my seven classes, for example, we actually had to elect people into the positions for running the new English Corner. Enough people were interested in the position that I didn't have to appoint anybody in the remaining two. I put my contact information -- notably my instant messenger accounts -- up on the screen and now have at least a dozen students who've gone to get GoogleTalk accounts to speak with me online. From this I stumbled over a couple who are avid Linux users and a couple more who, because I'm using Linux, want to give it a try. So now I think I'll also be arranging a WUISS Ubuntu User's Group as an outside activity to help these newcomers learn more about Linux. I've also ordered 300 CDs from Canonical's free "shipit" service to give as gifts to the students.

So, now the week is over and the weekend upon me (and also almost over) I find I'm a little bit lonely. Joan went off on a junket with her female colleagues arranged as part of International Women's Day (little-known trivia: the Mandarin pronunciation of the date -- 三八 or "sanba" -- is a homonym for a Cantonese epithet for women). She left very early Saturday morning and her mother subsequently took off for a while to the apartment in Hanyang (like she does most weekends). As a result I've been here mostly by myself which is now sufficiently unusual that it's actually uncomfortable. I guess that means I'm well and truly used to married life.

Something I'm still not used to is back pain. (You'd think that by now I would be, wouldn't you?) While under control, it sometimes flares up and this last month of inactivity made it flare up more. Following this with the week of lugging a laptop to and from class has left my back in pretty bad shape. The medication is controlling it -- I'm only taking it when it flares really badly -- but I'm running out of it to the tune of eight remaining doses. After that I'm going to have to either get some more shipped to me at tremendous expense or go on another likely-fruitless search for methocarbamol here in China.

Aren't They Just The Cutest Thing?!

So, on Monday I begin the daily grind again. It's about time. I really don't enjoy holidays like this very much, you see. Travel is basically impossible unless you want to travel out of country or by plane. (Every expat needs to experience travelling over Spring Festival once while they're here. But only once.) Most places that would be of interest to me are one of:

• closed;
• overcrowded;
• overpriced;
• both overcrowded and overpriced.

So Spring Festival is, instead, a time of high stress family visits interspersed among long periods of intense boredom. You can't even do any decent shopping for geek toys or the like over much of that period.

So, needless to say, I'm looking forward to going back to work.

In traditional Chinese fashion I got sent my teaching schedule just shortly before the break began, too late for me to point out to them that the document they sent me couldn't be read. (It's a) in Chinese and b) garbled.) So I didn't even know which classes/subjects I'd be teaching until just this Thursday, not to mention small, unimportant details like where I'd be teaching them or when. I did finally get that information (with only one small question outstanding, but not requiring resolution until next week Wednesday -- so I expect to have an answer Tuesday night) just in time to plan lessons and arrange notes.

And today the monitor of one of my classes sends me an SMS message asking "will you be teaching us this term?". My answer is the typically Chinese one: "Maybe". Of course in context that means "yes". The monitor's response was a single word that makes me glad for my time spent in China. "Great!"

I didn't stay in China because of my employers. I didn't stay in China because of my coworkers (although I always found one or two at each place I liked -- Hello Nick, Wendy & Xiaoling!). I did stay in China to pursue the girl who later became my wife, but there was two years before that to account for.

No, the reason I stayed in China long enough to find the girl who'd later be my wife is simply the students. With the exception of the students attending the ratbag RMIT English Worldwide program at the Wuhan University of Science and Technology's International School (the non-REW students, too, were great!) my experience with students in China has been universally positive. My current school is no exception.