8.3. exile to jilin

Originally written the week of July 23rd.

Just when I thought I was beginning to get the grasp of Mandarin, in the form of the Beijing dialect, I've been unceremoniously dumped somewhere else. Figures, doesn't it? On Wednesday, my cousin saw me onto the train at the Beijing station headed for Jilin Province, and the provincial city of Liuhe, where my third aunt on my father's side lives.

I arrived early Thursday morning, after a restless night of tossing and turning on the bottom bunk. It was a nice train journey, whereupon I made headway into my German text, brought with Lucy at Xidan, finished another chapter in "The Second Sex", and did more knitting, among other things. Then woke up at 5 a.m. Unpleasant, that. But I got to sleep away the morning, after I arrived at my third aunt's. She has three grown-up children, who all have kids of their own. Her youngest son had a daughter, after the last time I visited, and now she is a six-year old sprite, who likes to tickle her cousin.

Oh, and they call me aunt. I FEEL SO OLD.

I felt relatively young for most of the time at summer camp, though. And since I haven't recounted it at all, I'll write about it in bits. The reason why I felt so young at summer camp was that the kids and my co-workers, most of them, were of a comparable age. There were nine of us counsellors in total, and about 49 squirmy, disobedient, bright and spoiled kids to watch over. The counsellor-in-chief, Wang Laoshi, has got to be one of my favorite people that I've met this summer. He's 30, although I think he looks a little older, and the first time I saw him, he freaked me out because he looked so serious. And he is quite serious, a lot of the time, with high expectations, and he looks at you sternly and doesn't hesitate to yell at you if you're not doing your job. But once he relaxes, into non-professional mode, he makes the wackiest jokes, puts on accents and airs, makes us tell stories, and chain-smokes like there's no tomorrow.

His nickname for me can also be loosely translated as, "Miss Tummy Ma" because while I was stretching, my shirt revealed too much of my stomach. I mean, this guy is ridiculous. And hence why I love him. He also drinks a lot, but that story comes later. To put it plainly, this guy's philosophy is work hard, play hard.

The other counsellors, of which there are 7, were mostly Beida or Tsinghua students, both undergrads and grad students. The only one who wasn't was Aiqi, whom I adore! Her nickname is Xiao Ou, because her last name is Ou, and she was one of the assistant counsellors, like me. The two of us were basically in charge of helping out Wang Laoshi whenever we could, and so we shared a room, a walkie-talkie, and it's a good thing we really took to each other. Aiqi is from Guangdong Province, and hence has the cutest Cantonese accent when she speaks Mandarin. Once, when she was too sleepy while I was trying to wake her up, she told me to go away in Cantonese, and then when she realized, we both laughed so hard. (What's also funny is that when I get woken up from a nap, I tend to speak English. Surprise!) We spent a lot of time together, from walking to the web café in town to upload photos to the school website, and buying medicine for the kids who were coming down with heat stroke and some bad colds, and generally, running around and doing errands for Wang Laoshi. Aiqi has cute curly hair, and a Nivea deodorant spray that she used on me a few times, making me yelp because it was so cold. It was nice-smelling, though, and before we went to bed, we would always gossip a little about the co-counsellors and what mood Wang Laoshi was in today, and how the kids were being insufferable, generally. It was so nice to have someone to confide in. Before I leave China, she's coming back to Beijing, so we'll have to get dinner or something. I will miss her dearly!

The other six counsellors were each in charge of a group of the students, and they were pretty good chums too. There were four girls and two boys. We all became pretty good friends over the course of the two-week camp, but I think the most interesting moment came while the kids were in one classroom doing a lesson, and I had just woken up from a nap in the room where all the counsellors were chilling. Luo Cheng is a smart, and funny grad student in chemistry from Tsinghua, and he is a devout Party member. While I was sleeping, he had embarked on a fairly thorough discussion of democracy and Marxist studies from a Western point of view with Zhu Linhua, and Li Yan, who both attended Beida. Li Yan is older, though, than all of us, and is currently doing the last year of an Int'l Relations degree at Tsinghua. I woke up in time to briefly contributed to the discussion, which was extraordinarily interesting. I love well-educated and well-spoken people who have completely opposite viewpoints from me, and Luo Cheng was just that - hearing him and the other two girls debate the relative merits of democracy and the value that Marxist theory has in modern Western political philosophy was incredibly stimulating. In Chinese, no less. I was able to add a bit to the conversation, considering that sosc, for all of last year, basically confronted the question of democracy as well as Marxist studies. And I kind of squeed in happiness when Li Yan agreed with my summation that like everything, democracy was imperfect in practice, and cited a well-known aphorism about democracy being the best possible choice of a field of bad choices. I think it was good that we didn't completely get into a discussion of communism, because I am far too uneducated about these things, not to mention how to say commodity fetishism in Chinese.

And of course, all of us bonded over the lack of sleep, the long meetings, everyone being equally yelled at by Wang Laoshi, and how unmanageable the kids were. I miss all of them a good deal, but Wang Laoshi has promised to treat us all to dinner at his house and a viewing of "Kung-Fu Panda" in Chinese the next time we see all of each other, before I go back to the States. Score.