Random Thoughts Again

1. There is a mall near campus and it is named DENNIS.
2. The students address the Chinese professors as “Teacher” and they address the foreign faculty by their first name.
3. Middle school education was just recently mandated throughout the country.  But many of the farm children still do not go to middle school.
4. I still can’t get used to having people laugh when they see me.  Many times it is the first time they have ever seen a foreigner.
5. Yesterday, while I was waiting for the train, I had to pose with multiple babies which made me very uncomfortable.  They all have those jumpsuits with the slits in the crouch so they can just eliminate when they want.  This saves a small fortune on diapers and solid waste.  Anyway, one baby wasn’t cooperating and crying and taking way too long.  He finally posed to his mother’s satisfaction and he didn’t wet me so I survived.
6. I was sitting on a stool, getting my shoes polished when one of my students came by.  She told me the shoe polisher wanted to ask me many questions.  I told her to go ahead.  My student translated and the woman giggled and told my student, “I don’t know what to ask?’
7. There is an abundance of foreign faculty who are conservative Christians on this campus.  I was told that Sias University purposely recruited this faculty group because the labor was cheap.  But it did not make sense to me.  Why would an atheist government recruit evangelicals?  But today at lunch, one Christian woman told me that the evangelical colleges in the USA promote opportunities for their graduates to teach in china as sort of a missionary calling.  It is her belief that the communist government looks the other way because the “spiritual people” do a much better job than the nonspiritual people.  She believes the spiritual people are more interested in the education of their students.  And the first step to enlightenment is education.
8. Tuition and board costs each student about $1200/year which is three times more expensive than other universities in china.
9. I wandered in to an apartment complex that had several ma Jong tables and they were all electronic.  So the players shove their ma Jong blocks into this hole in the middle of the table and then push a button and the blocks emerge from the bottom, all lined up and looking like the Great Wall of China.
10. Many Chinese people do not age well.  Years of harsh exposure to the sun ages they and many have faces as wrinkled as prunes.  So there is an expression often used to complement an older woman:  “I think you must have been beautiful when you were younger.”