Spring into Summer



Pretty is the tea they serve

Spring in China is a time when most teachers enter a workaholic phase. It is also the time of the black tea. High up in Shandong's Laoshan Mountains, experienced pickers work nimble fingered to bring us curative, black, Shandong tea.

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.

Midnight flowers


Roadside flowers in Beijing

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.

Flowers painted by Zhou Gu Jing

Girl and boy love flower

Lily wild  flower

We are by the sea, beautiful Jinshatan - the jewel of the east coast - stunning, beguiling, and all ours. Spring has brought the sea screaming, open mouthed with its fish tales and sea shanties; the lull before the sailors go back out for months-on-end to bring back yields of sea cucumbers, oysters, clams and Spanish-Japanese mackerel. Spring allows the sailors and fishermen to make merry, mend nets and enjoy.


Ladies clean the mussels - Huangdao fishing village

Going home

The sea goes on

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.


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:




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.


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.

Majestic

Citadel

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.


Street siesta

Another one bites the spring floor



Street mirror

In the old quarter of Huangdao Lu, Qingdao, another spring is passing and the residents still remain in their homes, resisting yet another year of being moved out and on to newer homes up the road. Life goes on as it has for hundreds of years.


Daydreamer. Photo: Ying Wang

Girl and boy play like in the old days. Photo: Ying Wang

Serious reading

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.

Anna-Tiuhilee, our graduate student, was accepted into my old film school, Concordia University’s, for her MFA - thrilled for her - her graduate documentary breath-taking, about a Buddhist tribe in the west of China, where there is friction between father and son due to his gaming addiction

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.


Anna working

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.

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/

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 . . .


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!

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!



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.


Sea cucumber. Photo: www.freeimages.co.uk

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:


In two weeks we finish semester.
Now it is summer.
Summer flowers.
Summer wine.
Summer walks on the beach.
Summer beer.

Beach boys


Noodles for beach pups


Beach van food

The sea opens her arms, warm, happy, holding us.

And then . . . I go home to Europe for my summer break.

Have a lovely month ahead.



End of semester photo, my two graduate students, Tao and Gau, terrified, just before final presentation




























Comments

  1. fascinating, jeanne. you must be having a blast

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  2. I'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. :)
    Susan

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