Spring into Summer
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| Pretty is the tea they serve |
Time
has been divided carefully, like tea leaves, between Qingdao and
Beijing, then back to school, running up, down, and along the corridors, trying
to locate classes that are last minute changing…students rushing along with us,
puffing on sweet-smelling cigarettes. And as we rushed, spring went
wild with flowers trilling and singing, tumbling down, entwining with other
plants, going anywhere their tiny branch fingers can go - a form of social
flower consciousness.
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| Midnight flowers |
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| Roadside flowers in Beijing |
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| Zhou Gu Jing - celebrated brush painter |
The other day I
leant some words in Chinese to describe Qingdao flowers: Savage, 狂野
- Kuángyě, Willful, 任性,
Rènxìng, Restive: 好動 Hàodòng,
and Naughty - 淘氣 Táoqì. Just as the
Inuit have 50 words or more for snow, I am collecting words for flowers.
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| Flowers painted by Zhou Gu Jing |
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| Girl and boy love flower |
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| Lily wild flower |
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| Ladies clean the mussels - Huangdao fishing village |
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| Going home |
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| The sea goes on |
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| Blue, blue, 'lectric blue |
In the spring the female toilet cleaners change scarves from orange to yellow. Ming Lee is also my Chinese teacher. She is
toilet inspector number 5’s wife.
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| Beach teacher |
For those who love Iggy Pop – I do, do, do – and have his name tattooed
on my arm, long before people had tattoos, by an American sailor in Spain too
many years ago for me to mention, but it hurt so much that I stopped at IG. The
IG has just been awarded France’s cultural honor - commander of Ordre des Arts et des Lettres - for his 70th
birthday:
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| Indian ink and needle on a beach in Spain, long, long ago |
In the spring some reptiles emerge from a long deep sleep. Our river
snapper turtle just woke up, hungry for clams. We bought him last year at the
live market. He was about to be bought by a little lady who told us how she
would cook him, her lips quivering, “turtle soup is 美味 měiwèi - delicious". So we snapped him up, poor snapper, before she did for 400 quai. She showed no avarice as we took her turtle, explaining carefully to Ying how to prepare him, with exact details which I will not
describe here, except to say we did not eat him.
He is vicious, spiky, grumpy, and with one snap and bend of his head, a
finger can come off. Yet I have grown rather fond of him. I am trying to find a
place to put him where no one will re-hunt him to re-sell him, to then eat him with lots of ginger and garlic. I call him Gnasher.
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| Gnasher bored |
My birthday was at the beginning of spring, and spent in Beijing,
blasted in 30-degree heat. I chose to sit on top of a double decker bus which
went round and round and round the centre from one railway station to the next
and back again. I sat up top, like a kid, with Ying, front row, best seat, for
four hours. It felt like the days of the famed Magic Bus when we would go over
land from London to Athens, where heat and colors fused with scented jasmine and lily lilac.
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| Majestic |
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| Citadel |
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| Slowtime |
Spring brings with it extended sleeping, people just lie down, anywhere, anyhow, after lunch for what they call "rice sleep". Homes are swept out, cleared of debris and cobwebs, out onto the sidewalks for the day.
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| Street siesta |
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Another one bites the spring floor
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| Street mirror |
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| Daydreamer. Photo: Ying Wang |
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| Girl and boy play like in the old days. Photo: Ying Wang |
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| Serious reading |
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| Meat stall and bike |
And as we meander slowly, like the warming of the sea, into summer, I dedicate the rest of this blog to
our students and school.
She went back to Ganan, the hinterlands, where the tribe still lives in the tents, to conclude her work. She literally broke down and cried when she got the acceptance letter.
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| Anna working |
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| Lightstar awards - Anna prettiest star |
But - and there is always a but - buts have a way of bringing down any
sentence. BUT her English grade was not high enough, she was missing .5! Only
.5! So she must re sit her English exam again. Concordia wrote back saying
they will keep her place! (Thank you Concordia.)
She is now, at home, 4,000 miles away tackling that dreaded test. I hope
she gets the 6! I am sure she will get a 6. She must get 6!
I am trying to understand how the exam works. Her
English is excellent, albeit a bit slow at times, but isn't slow better than filled with mistakes? So I am very
confused by how the exam is graded and who grades it. She has also been given a place in Beijing, but her dream is Canada.
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| Us@Qingdao |
Documentary
Class
Our
two documentary classes will finish in three weeks. The editing is almost done
and it is very exciting. These are first-year students, so sorting out
technical glitches was the main problem, reminding me of how Tao Gu, my dear
friend, and I first sat in the computer lab at Concordia, our first time ever
in front of a Mac and did not know how to turn it on - I am talking only ten
years ago! (Sorry Tao!)
Talking of Tao, he has just had screened Taming the Horse, his documentary, at Visions du Réel in competition. For those who read German, here is a
critic:
http://www.filmexplorer.ch/detail/taming-the-horse/
http://www.filmexplorer.ch/detail/taming-the-horse/
And
so, here I am, ten years later, with students who do not know how to create a
project to edit with, and many walk around, proudly, holding their hard-drives
by the wires, like wiggling mice. “Oops…teacher! Help! It dropped on the
floor!” Not saving material. Leaving it on a communal desk top. Buying material
online because they think it is better than what they have shot. Forgetting to
check for levels on the camera. Forgetting to charge the batteries.The list
goes on . . .
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| Class time, editing lab |
We
have some real gems, though. One team is shooting a government barber. The old man
should have retired years ago, but he keeps on cutting “heads,” as they say,
and his clients won’t let him go. He does ten a day, ten quai a pop, so he
makes 20$ a day - 120$ a week.
He is a very, very happy man!
He is a very, very happy man!
The
piece is very meditative, locals come in to banter, read the paper, have a
shave, a hair rub. Time has stood still, just as it was in the 70s when the shop first opened. The chairs, the tables, the equipment. Nothing has changed.
Another
team is shooting “A day with an underwater wedding photographer.” No customers
came in the week they were there, so they borrowed one of their classmates, who brought two large goldfish
along, as props!
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| Lady in red |
Another
team went out on the sea cucumber boat, diving down with the fisherman with
archaic gear, filming while they plucked from the ocean.
We
watched the hectic and dangerous images today of a diver being pulled up as he
was falling unconscious.
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| Sea cucumber. Photo: www.freeimages.co.uk |
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| Scuba diver. Photo: www.freeimages.co.uk |
Online Film Festival
Next semester we will put up an online film festival through “iQiyi,” the Chinese equivalent of YouTube,
where we will have our own channel for the students. This is to encourage the
students to think outside school and prepare to screen to an audience, which is
something the Chinese students are often nervous about, being quite humble. We will also screen the work throughout Qingdao and Huangdao, as we did last year.
Professional English
I
was not hired as an English teacher, I was hired with Ying Wang, my Chinese
co-worker, to create a documentary direction which would be different from what
was already being taught in the other departments. However, something told me
to do a TESOL teaching certificate before leaving Montreal. Hunches are often
worth following up, so I did. Upon arrival in 2015, the department decided to
open up a professional English direction alongside our documentary class and
asked me to tutor it.
This
is my third semester, bumps and scrapes, and a lot of learning along the way.
The
class runs 16 weeks and the students create a personal newsreel from A-Z: from
writing the idea, synopsis, researching material, shooting, voiceover,
subtitles and output. For the final
presentation they need to write an artist’s statement on why they want to be cinematographers.
This
is my favorite statement:
Hello, my name is Wei
Chuanxing. I am not an artist. In fact my heart never wanted to become an
artist. I think that the artist has a reputation. I just want to do my own
love. I understand life is quiet. I am
quiet. I feel artists are eccentric, crazy, and I am relatively flat. So, I prefer
the camera because I hiding behind the lens. For the shy, this is the best way.
This is where I find me.
(Wei Chuanxing, 22)
The Newsreel
I
almost gave up with my favorite student, the wayward, undisciplined, but
original Xue Wen Hao. He turned up late, day of presentation, took me to one
side and asked me to not be angry with his Chinese-English-hip-hop video.
How
could I be?
Dormitory Chinese-English Hip Hop:
Dormitory Chinese-English Hip Hop:
Now it is summer.
Summer flowers.
Summer wine.
Summer walks on the beach.
Summer beer.
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| Beach boys |
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| Noodles for beach pups |
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| Beach van food |
The
sea opens her arms, warm, happy, holding us.
And then . . . I go home to Europe for my summer break.
And then . . . I go home to Europe for my summer break.
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| End of semester photo, my two graduate students, Tao and Gau, terrified, just before final presentation |
fascinating, jeanne. you must be having a blast
ReplyDeleteI've just got all caught up with your all your blog entries. How much fun I had reading about your adventures!! And how awesome is Gnasher!?! Good for you old friend. :)
ReplyDeleteSusan