This is old, like from June, but am just now again able to access the blogger website. Some of this is outdated, will try and update afresh again a-soon!

Loves, Jess

Oddly, I woke up before my alarm this morning and am waiting for the hot water to come on so I figured I’d update quickly.

Hmm, in looking through my last few posts, the common trend seems to be: BUSY! Sorry to disappoint, I’m starting to feel like a broken record.

This week is my last week of teaching. Mixed feelings. Love my students, I get a lot of energy from them. But the job itself is draining and not very fulfilling and trying to straddle between North Media and teaching has become a juggling act. However I feel it’s a testament of my student’s love when I send them text messages in the morning for an event and they show up en masse that evening. I call it my insta-crowd and it does make me feel like I’ve made a difference. Sweet!

I continue to go through the roller coaster feelings, however this time it’s not so much personal misgivings but rather motivation issues. Some days, I really like what I’m doing, the job is fun. Other days, I seriously question the point of working 12-14 hours a day. I realize I haven’t found my “destiny job” and I gather that this is fantastic experience, but I’m always a little cautious about an unintended marriage to my job. My family has a history of “workaholicism” so I need to be careful, particularly if I’m not entirely clear about my goals.

The job is still really cool though. Let’s see, last week I attended a business seminar at which I got to meet the Crown Prince of Belgium. I even had a pleasant conversation with the princess! This week, I worked with the consulate in putting together a couple of events, including a lunchtime gospel concert for some local officials and university leaders. I’m getting this events coordinator role figured out, understanding North Media’s infrastructure, who to work with, figuring out what I can do and what I delegate. Now that the first big catering event is wrapped up, I now feel like I can tackle just about any request they throw at me. Only the hard and the strong…(btw 300 is a great movie—I could totally be a Spartan woman!)

I forget sometimes that I’m 23. I think my peers forget it too which is fine most of the time, but it makes for some pretty profound a-ha! moments when I do suddenly realize the situation I’m in. Yesterday evening I joined the consulate folks and the gospel singers for dinner. Well the singers were students, 19-20 years, you know, the typical American college student. They were talking about facebook and Barry Bonds and all the semantics of instant messaging and who likes who and what does “let’s talk later” really mean between guys and girls and I just sat back and listened and was just kind of like “wow, I feel so foreign.” I’m so removed from American culture and the stuff I worry about is literally in a completely different realm. Even some of my habits more resemble Chinese people than American. I take for granted so many of the little things about living in China: people, customs, how different Chinese food is and if you’re not used to it, how unappetizing it can appear at times. I’m acutely aware of relationships and extremely sensitive to how I come across to people. I appreciate Chinese people and sometimes laugh to myself about the love affair I seem to have with the entire population. The deep sense of culture, their laidback mellowness, their sensitivity to relationships with others, I’m just so intrigued by it and it’s comfortable to me. Even though I’m different, I feel like my understanding and respect for the Chinese people is aiding me in being a part of their family. Really, that’s not too hard, so long as you show interest and respect, the Chinese will welcome anyone to be a part of their family. I feel blessed to be able to appreciate and begin to understand the Chinese and “why they do what they do.” Foreigners here sometimes complain that the Chinese are hard to work with, mysterious, sneaky or just plain different. I’ve been reading this book by a Chinese scholar named Lin Yutang called My Country and My People. This guy was brilliant, spoke and wrote better English than most Americans! Anyways, he wrote this about 50 years ago but it’s extremely illuminating as far as understanding the roots of Chinese thinking. It explains a lot of what I’ve observed over the last year and gives me an even deeper appreciation of the country as a whole.

One of the most revealing sections is about the Chinese sense of old roguery. If you’ve ever studied Aikido or Judo or some other self-defense martial art, you’ll understand the concept of letting your enemies come close and then using their energy to counter. The idea of roguery is kind of along those lines. The Chinese are a self-preserving people and in some cases harbor an all-around contempt for young upstart high energy. Lin describes it better but here’s an analogy that I just thought of to help you understand the concept in a paragraph: Things happen in their own way. Say you have to get an elephant from one watering hole to another. The American way of doing it might be to talk at the elephant, telling him that this water here is no good or something to that effect, that Mr. Elephant should come drink at the watering hole over there because somehow it’s better. When that doesn’t work, the American might get behind the elephant and try pushing or pulling on the elephant’s ears or do whatever physically possible to try and get the elephant to move. The Chinese way on the other hand might be to say something like “Mr. Elephant, there’s water over here, water over there, whichever the case, drink if you’re thirsty, move if you think it would benefit you and the other elephants. Oh and that American who’s trying to push you from behind, ignore him. Just sit back and smile at him. He’ll run out of energy soon enough.” It may not get the job done, the elephant may choose to stay at the original hole. But in the Chinese mind, what’s all this fuss? if there’s water in two places, just drink wherever you can, who cares which hole it’s from? As long as you don’t infringe on the other elephants, do things whichever way suits you and everyone stays relatively content and well watered.

I attended a debriefing on China relations by one of the American consular officers to a group of visiting American academics. Somewhere in the midst of his speaking about the frustrations of the American government towards the Chinese government, why the Chinese won’t change their ways, why they ignore foreign governments pushing on them, bureaucracy and corruption issues and why on earth they just don’t “see it our way,” it dawned on me that the US would have a lot less problems if they added an ounce of understanding to their foreign policies, particularly with the Chinese. The Lin Yutang book is a must-read for it puts a background on the Chinese way of thought in terms that Westerners can understand. Confucianism and Taoism are the bases. People throw these words around, but until one really understands how these two ideologies react with one another and the massively long Chinese history, and how it contrasts to Christian/Western idealism, it’s pretty much impossible to adequately reconcile Chinese thought with Western style thinking.

Current mood: Fascinated and enlightened