The travels of Justin

I’m sick today. 不好！I missed class and don’t feel optimistic about tomorrow. Speaking a foreign language is hard enough without having your ears plug up so you can’t even hear yourself!

In Tianjin I had purchased three sets of flash cards that each have 100 cards to help learn 汉字 (Chinese simplified characters). I don’t use them very often, but they are still very helpful to me. Today was one of those days when I whipped them out while sitting cross-legged on the styrofoam floor mats in my living room. Despite the foggy feeling of having a cold, and having not looked at these cards in months, I managed to correctly identify 75 of the characters in the first set. The frustrating ones are the characters that I recognize, but I can’t identify — after 14-months, every character looks familiar.

When studying, I often listen to the TV to hear what a good accent sounds like; I think Chinese TV is particularly good for this because almost everything has subtitles that are really great for studying. Like other days, today I kept catching words I understand, but were used in contexts I did not understand. Some text messages with a good friend of mine in Tianjin enlightened me to the meaning of these words, but there’s no dictionary that can help in situations like that. It’s comforting to know this is the universal experience of learning a foreign language.

Feeling dizzy and hungry, I escaped my apartment to catch dinner with a friend. My apartment is about 3-blocks away from the school and one can never be sure how the local people will react when I emerge from my apartment. The people I pass in the hall of my building are quite friendly, always giving me a “你好” (hello), or asking “你吃了吗” (have you eaten?) — especially when I greet them first in Chinese. Outside the building there are always lots of people walking around, playing poker or mahjong, and otherwise being very social. I suppose I’ve never wanted to submit myself to the endless questions of nosy and curious neighbours (who could blame them), but each day I can feel like I’m on parade as I leave my apartment.

I walk through the complex to the only exit gate and sometimes get a friendly response from the security guard, or the old men and women who perch there. Less frequently now I can still occassionally catch someone’s voice behind me asking other residents what building the foreigner lives in. Today a girl younger than 10 was looking at her friend while they walked toward me along the sidewalk. When she turned to look at the person in her path he jumped in surprise and put her hand on her chest momentarily winded. Some old people snickered quietly while I just smiled and said, “你好” (hello), to the stunned little girl. The expression on her face was so dramatic, thus inspiring the title of my article today.

Today I was greeted by a family possibly from the Xinjiang autonomous region. Fairly or unfairly, most people warn that crime and pick-pocketing is high when many of these migrant workers pass through. I dislike generalizations, but this particular band was suspiciously walking up and down a small strip of a busy sidewalk and my friend suggested we’d better move along quickly just in case. It seems like everyone I’ve met in Nanchang has a story of being pick-pocketed. I haven’t had the experience and I have no wish to change that.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 30th, 2006 at 9:15 am and is filed under China 中国, Culture, Life and living, Nanchang (南昌市). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.