| 27 July 2004 | 2004 7 27
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| 27 July 2004 | 2004727
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Although eye-opening, my first ten days in Guanting have not been as difficult as my first days in Dalian. In fact, I feel quite at home already. I guess that's only to be expected, now that I have more experience living and travelling in China. When I first arrived in the country a year and a half ago, I noticed many differences between China and Australia. But now it's the the differences between Qinghai province and the north-east that I notice.
Most of today was spent on the bus travelling back from Xining. Jin Baoyan came with me, but Mr Zhu has stayed in Xining to meet somebody from Save the Children Fund on the weekend. Our director seems to be away on business a lot.
For dinner, those of us in the office (which included Mr Su, a high school teacher and member of SDA) went to a darou ("big meat") restaurant. Apparently, "big meat" means pork. We were served with two big plates of cold meat and sauce to dip it in. This kind of meal is called shouzhua ("grab by hand"), and you have to pick up the big bones to gnaw the meat off them. I've never encountered it in eastern China.
Worked most of today. I asked if there is any such thing as a "weekend" at SDA, and the answer is no. I also remember Xiao Bai, who works at the Guanting local council, telling me that he often has to work overtime. I've heard the same thing from several of the graduates from the college where I used to work, but I never imagined that such a thing could happen in a small town like Guanting!
My contribution to dinner today was helping to cut some vegetables. I'd like to do some cooking once I'm more settled in here, but the problem is that there's only one chinese dish that I can cook well enough to feed to other people.
I feel that Yang Ying and Jin Baoyan have started to warm to me. For example, quiet Jin Baoyan has started to say more to me than just "hello" in the morning and "have some more" (repeatedly) at meals. That's typical chinese courtesy: he virtually force fed us at lunch today until we were too full to move.
After breakfast I offered to help wash the dishes. Well, simply offering is often not enough in China, so I tried to carry out the task by force. But Yang Ying was even more forceable in pushing me out of the kitchen!
Some time during the day I developed a bout of diarrhea. I don't think it's too serious though.
I almost finished translating the three newsletters that I've been working on before Mr Zhu returned with the Save the Children Fund representative, a Mr Wu from Hong Kong. He's quite young, and we got along pretty well.
I had a rather uncomfortable night with stomach pains, and could only manage to eat a little bit of bread for breakfast. Today we all accompanied Mr Wu to inspect the schools in the area that Save the Children Fund has donated money to. Since they are in various stages of construction, this usually meant standing around in the sun while bigwigs talked about things that I didn't understand, and due to my state of health I found it very uncomfortable.
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| Standing (and squatting) around. The slogan on the building says: "Respect your teachers, love the school, be civilised and observe discipline". |
Mr Zhu offered to cure me with what he called Qinghai's two best medicines, alcohol and song, but I declined. Mr Zhu seems to know lots of people in the villages that we visited, and he was always stopping the car to shake hands with people, usually elderly men.
For lunch we stopped at a tiny village restaurant and had another of the regional specialties: yangza tang, for which I can think of no more favourable translation than "sheep gizzard soup". Actually, it was lucky that I had my illness as an excuse, because I don't think I could have stomached a bowl of chopped-up organs in broth at even the best of times.
Outside one of the schools I bumped into some friendly kids. They're from Lhasa, but staying with relatives in the village. Their chinese pronunciation was more standard than anyone else I've met in the last week!
I thought I was getting better last night, but this morning I felt sick again. After finishing the last bit of translation, I just stayed in my room most of the day, resting and reading books.
| Looking a bit pale there, buddy ;) |
| Nice Unkle Kat 01.08.2004 , 22:01 |
| I am also named Jin Baoyan,but I am female,not male.I had thought there wouldn't be another one also named the same name.I am wrong this time.Mine is Jin4 Bao3 Yan4. |
| Jin Baoyan [] 12.07.2005 , 11:41 |
| Oops, I'm afraid that I later learnt that his name was actually Jin Baoyuan (金宝元). Sorry! Also, it's his "school name", not his real name, but a lot of people call him by that name. |
| Todd 12.07.2005 , 19:38 |
| Hi,Todd! I am picking mistakes again! I think the "school name" should be the "formal name" since the Chinese version is "学名"(or “大名“)which means people use this name in formal occasions,not only in schools. Most Chinese people have both a "formal name" and a "nickname" （小名，乳名）.The latter called by his / her eldership in family(in most cases). His /her friends can call their monicker(外号，绰号)but not the nickname! |
| yunyue7286 [] 23.09.2005 , 11:43 |
| Actually, I made another mistake. I guess I don't really understand this whole "formal name" versus "informal name" thing, and some conventions regarding mangghuar names are a bit different to ordinary Han names. In fact, despite the fact that mangghuar have their own unique mongolic language, their names are selected from chinese characters, but one difference is that two or three characters is the norm, rather than one or two characters as for ordinary chinese names. It turns out that Jin Baoyuan is actual his original name, and in fact I should probably write it as Jinbaoyuan because "Jin" is not a surname in this case. Later on, when he went to school, a "formal name" was chosen for him, which includes his surname (Zhu). His formal name is "Zhu Jinliang" (朱金良) -- note that the "Jin" character was also kept. Also note that this formal name fits ordinary Han chinese naming conventions. For a lot of people, chosing a formal name is not this complicated though. If their original name has only two characters, then their formal name is usually just these two characters with their surname prepended. |
| Todd 05.11.2005 , 13:09 |
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