Days 63-65: School, Xuewei, and Chinese Lesson

Monday I had my class--just one class because I'm now having my American Literature class only every other week. This week, actually, I wasn't too sad about this because I was so busy last week with all the Taiwan business. On the way to Songjiang, I got to talk to Alex English, one of the teachers here. It was nice getting to know him better. He likes board games and he told us how to get to a movie theater near us. He also runs the "brown bag" lecture program and asked me if I'd like to do one, to which I agreed. I'm interested in talking about GLBT topics there. We're still doing The Awakening in my class: a couple students did a presentations on male characters in the novel; we had an interesting discussion on Freudian theory. Then a lot of them asked questions after class, so, as expected, I missed the 3:00 pm bus, but I got the one going home at 4:30. I talked to Raymond on the way home. We have some interesting conversations about literature, politics, and Chinese culture. Right now he's reading a book called China's Hidden Children about adoption and China; I think I'd like to take a look at it myself. I got home about 7 pm and then kind of collapsed--Mondays usually tire me out. However, there was one bit of amazing news. KERRY FINALLY GOT HIS PACKAGE!  It had been held up in customs for SIX WEEKS. I even took a video of him opening it up--it was basically a care package with such things as voltage converters, parmesan cheese, chocolates, a coloring book, two small stuffed animals, and some recent mail.

Tuesday the big event was having dinner with Xuewei and her family. We went to a Beijing Roast Duck restaurant on Hongqiao Road--it took 11 subway stops on Line 3 to get there. The food was magnificent: duck (of course), but also pork, sweet and sour fish (squirrel fish, Xuewei said it was called), scrambled eggs with shrimp, tofu, crysanthemum tea, rice cakes, and many vegetable dishes. Our new Chinese tutor, Deborah, also joined us, so we got to meet her for the first time. The Chinese folks took great pleasure in watching us eat and in watching us make fools of ourselves (well, me, mostly) with chopsticks. Xuewei gave us mail, cheese, Kerry's parmesan crisps, peanut clusters from Barbara (our dept. secretary), and a card and gift from Beth, our dept. chair.  It was so wonderful--it felt like my birthday or Christmas!  After dinner, we walked to the subway with Deborah.  We plied her with a lot of questions about Chinese culture: Why do women dance in the street? What is "Mama ne shay?"  What are those cartoon cats?  She tried to be very patient with us.  We liked her immediately and looked forward to our Wednesday lesson.

Here's a picture of us with Xuewei and her family (that's Deborah, our new Chinese tutor, on the left):

Wednesday Kerry and I cleaned the apartment before Deborah arrived: I swept up and cleaned the kitchen table; he took charge of the bathroom. Deborah worked with us between 12-2.  We reviewed the letters and pronunciation, basic greetings, and talking to a taxi driver. She was very kind, again, with all our questions. I think having a private tutor will be good for us, especially since I think we're going to travel a lot and miss a lot of the Friday sessions at SISU.  All day long we ate leftovers from last night's dinner; tonight--chicken with onions and greens. Tomorrow we get the EPer Market order, and I'm glad because we're a bit low on groceries. Kerry went to Century Mart briefly today, but he didn't bring home much substantive stuff.